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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

Robotic systems will perform mobile surveys for scientific and engineering purposes as part of future missions on lunar and planetary surfaces. With site characterization as a task objective various system configurations and surveying techniques are possible. This chapter describes several examples of mobile surveying approaches using local and remote sensing configurations. A geometric measure of area coverage performance is applied to each and relative performance in surveying a common area is characterized by expected performance trends. Performance metrics that solely express geometric aspects of the robotic task are limited in utility as decision aids to human mission operators. As such, the importance of enriching such metrics by incorporating additional attributes germane to surveying on planetary surfaces is highlighted. Examples of enriched metrics employed by recent NASA research work on human-supervised robotic surveying are provided.

Keywords

robotic surveying, planetary surface exploration, in-situ remote sensing, area coverage performance, site characterization, resource prospecting, human supervision, consolidated performance metrics, real-time performance metrics

Notes

Text Reference

Edward Tunstel, John M. Dolan, Terrence W. Fong, and Debra Schreckenghost, "Mobile Robotic Surveying Performance for Planetary Surface Site Characterization ," Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking of Intelligent Systems, E. Tunstel, and E. Messina , ed., Springer, 2009

BibTeX Reference

@incollection{Dolan_2009_6426,
   author = "Edward Tunstel and John M Dolan and Terrence W Fong and Debra Schreckenghost",
   editor = "E. Tunstel, and E. Messina ",
   title = "Mobile Robotic Surveying Performance for Planetary Surface Site Characterization ",
   booktitle = "Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking of Intelligent Systems",
   publisher = "Springer",
   month = "August",
   year = "2009",
}

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