Decisional autonomy of planetary rovers

To achieve the ever increasing demand for science return, planetary exploration rovers require more autonomy to successfully perform their missions. Indeed, the communication delays are such that teleoperation is unrealistic. Although the current rovers (such as MER) demonstrate a limited navigation autonomy, and mostly rely on ground mission planning, the next generation (e.g. NASA Mars Science Laboratory and ESA Exomars) will have to regularly achieve long range autonomous navigation tasks. However, fully autonomous long range navigation in partially known planetary-like terrains is still an open challenge for robotics. Navigating hundreds of meters without any human intervention requires the robot to be able to build adequate representations of its environment, to plan and execute trajectories according to the kind of terrain traversed, to control its motions and to localize itself as it moves. All these activities have to be planned, scheduled, and performed according to the rover...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: JFR
• Authors: Félix Ingrand, Simon Lacroix, Solange Lemai-Chenevier, Frederic Py
• Keywords: JFR 2007, Limited Navigation Autonomy, Long Range, Range Autonomous Navigation