FRANKAUTONOMOUS

The first autonomous site survey on the Moon. Targeting CLPS delivery in 2029.

Autonomy layer Lunar sim Research papers All built in-house

What we do

FRANK Autonomous Systems builds the autonomy layer for planetary rovers. Mission 1 puts the first autonomous swarm on the Moon: hazard mapping and site-characterisation surveys first, subsurface mineral prospecting second. Ground-truth data the lunar economy needs.

FRANK

Flexible Recurrent Active-memory Neural Kernel

Brain-inspired decision engine. Full rover autonomy in 20ms on a Raspberry Pi.

SAPPERS

Cheap, redundant rovers. $1M each vs $500M VIPER. Lose one, mission continues.

SUNBEAM

Solar tower base station. Charging, comms, thermal. Enables permanent operations.

Team

Izen Thornton

Founder & CEO

Senior Autonomous Systems Test Pilot. CAP UAS Check Pilot Examiner. 400+ hours. Employee #6 at DoorDash Drone Delivery, founding flight test team. Built FRANK from scratch. FEMA/AFRCC certified incident manager.

Brandon LiWang

Founding Engineer

Hardware Engineer, Sentradel. UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering. IEEE-published on autonomous gas source detection. UC Merced MESA Lab: UGV sim-to-real.

Aaron Shey

Founding Engineer

UC Berkeley Cognitive Science. Research apprentice at Berkeley's DNA Sequencing Facility (URAP): Linux administration and Python pipelines on Savio, Berkeley's supercomputer. Bioinformatics and HPC.

Maggie Johnson

Contract R&D Engineer

USAF veteran. Honors Mechanical Engineering, Barrett Honors College at ASU. Space optics intern, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. SolidWorks and MATLAB.

Scott Nisbet

Founding Advisor