Recent Progress in Local and Global Traversability for Planetary Rovers - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Recent Progress in Local and Global Traversability for Planetary Rovers

Conference Paper, Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 2, pp. 1194 - 1200, April, 2000

Abstract

Autonomous planetary rovers operating in vast unknown environments must operate efficiently because of size, power and computing limitations. Recently, we have developed a rover capable of efficient obstacle avoidance and path planning. The rover uses binocular stereo vision to sense potentially cluttered outdoor environments. Navigation is performed by a combination of several modules that each "vote" for the next best action for the robot to execute. The key distinction of our system is that it produces globally intelligent behavior with a small computational resource--all processing and decision making is done on a single processor. These algorithms have been tested outdoors on our prototype rover, Bullwinkle, and have recently driven the rover 100 m at speeds of 15 cm/ sec. In this paper we systems report on the extensions on that we have previously developed that were necessary to achieve autonomous navigation in this domain.

BibTeX

@conference{Singh-2000-8004,
author = {Sanjiv Singh and Reid Simmons and Trey Smith and Anthony (Tony) Stentz and Vandi Verma and Alex Yahja and Kurt Schwehr},
title = {Recent Progress in Local and Global Traversability for Planetary Rovers},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
year = {2000},
month = {April},
volume = {2},
pages = {1194 - 1200},
publisher = {IEEE},
keywords = {rovers, obstacle avoidance, path planning, Mars, space, planetary},
}