Instrument Deployment for Mars Rovers
Abstract
Future Mars rovers, such as the planned 2009 MSL rover, require sufficient autonomy to robustly approach rock targets and place an instrument in contact with them. It took the 1997 Sojourner Mars rover between 3 and 5 communications cycles to accomplish this. This paper describes the NASA Ames approach to robustly accomplishing single cycle instrument deployment, using the K9 prototype Mars rover. An off-board 3D site model is used to select science targets for the rover. K9 navigates to targets using deduced reckoning, and autonomously assesses the target area to determine where to place an arm mounted microscopic camera. Onboard K9 is a resource cognizant conditional executive, which extends the complexity and duration of operations that a can be accomplished without intervention from mission control.
BibTeX
@conference{Pedersen-2003-106580,author = {Liam Pedersen and Maria Bualat and Clay Kunz and Susan Lee and Randy Sargent and Richard Washington and Anne Wright},
title = {Instrument Deployment for Mars Rovers},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
year = {2003},
month = {September},
volume = {2},
pages = {2535 - 2542},
}