Recent progress in local and global traversability for planetary rovers

Autonomous planetary rovers operating in vast unknown environments must operate efficiently because of size, power and computing limitations. Recently, we have developed a rover capable of efficient obstacle avoidance and path planning. The rover uses binocular stereo vision to sense potentially clu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2000, Vol.2, p.1194-1200 vol.2
Main Authors: Singh, S., Simmons, R., Smith, T., Stentz, A., Verma, V., Yahja, A., Schwehr, K.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Costs
Decision making
Intelligent robots
Navigation
Orbital robotics
Path planning
Prototypes
Robot sensing systems
Stereo vision
Vehicles
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Summary:Autonomous planetary rovers operating in vast unknown environments must operate efficiently because of size, power and computing limitations. Recently, we have developed a rover capable of efficient obstacle avoidance and path planning. The rover uses binocular stereo vision to sense potentially cluttered outdoor environments. Navigation is performed by a combination of several modules that each "vote" for the next best action for the robot to execute. The key distinction of our system is that it produces globally intelligent behavior with a small computational resource - all processing and decision making are done on a single processor. These algorithms have been tested on our outdoor prototype rover, Bullwinkle, and have recently driven the rover 100 m at a speed of 15 cm/sec. In this paper we report on the extension on the systems that we have previously developed that were necessary to achieve autonomous navigation in this domain.
ISSN:1050-4729
2577-087X
DOI:10.1109/ROBOT.2000.844761