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Published January 8, 1999 | Published
Book Section - Chapter Open

A practical autonomous path planner for turn-of-the-century planetary microrovers

Abstract

With the success of Mars Pathfinder's Sojourner rover, a new era of planetary exploration has opened, with demand for highly capable mobile robots. These robots must be able to traverse long distances over rough, unknown terrain autonomously, under severe resource constraints. Based on the authors' firsthand experience with the Mars Pathfinder mission, this paper reviews issues which are critical for successful autonomous navigation of planetary rovers. No currently proposed methodology addresses all of these issues. We next report on the 'Wedgebug' algorithm, which is applicable to planetary rover navigation in SE(2). The Wedgebug algorithm is complete, correct, requires minimal memory for storage of its worked model, and uses only on-board sensors, which are guided by the algorithm to efficiently senses only the data needed for motion planning. The implementation of a version of Wedgebug on the Rocky7 Mars Rover prototype at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is described, and experimental results from operation in simulated martian terrain are presented.

Additional Information

© 1999 Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). The work described here was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We would like to acknowledge the Long Range Science Rover team and the Mars Pathfinder Microrover Flight Experiment team, for help, inspiration, and flight experience with a rover. The authors would particularly like to thank Samad Hayati, Andrew Mishkin, Clark Olson, Rich Petras, and Todd Litwin for their invaluable assistance.

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