Integrated Vision/Control System for Autonomous Planetary Rovers

Current NASA plans call for extended year-long, multikilometer treks for the 2003 and 2005 Mars missions. A much greater amount of rover autonomy is required compared to the recent Sojourner mission, where the rover stayed within a 50 meter radius of the Pathfinder lander. A 2005 mission prototype system of a Sample Return Rover (SRR1) is currently being field tested at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA USA. BISMARC (Biologically Inspired System for Map-based Autonomous Rover Control) is a hybrid waveletlneural network based system that is capable of such autonomy. Previous simulations demonstrated that the system is capable of control for multiple rovers involved in a multiple cache recovery scenario. This robust behavior was obtained through the use of a free-flow hierarchy (FFH) as an action selection mechanism. A subsequent study extended BISMARC to include fault tolerance in the sensing and mechanical rover subsystems. The vision subsystem in the original BISMARC impl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: MVA
• Authors: Terry Huntsberger, Toshiro Kubota, John Rose
• Keywords: Map-based Autonomous Rover, MVA 1998, MVA 2007, Rover, Rover Autonomy