A visual display aid for planning rover traversals

Abstract

An interactive graphical planning system has been developed, which allows a human operator to design and check traversals (cross-country paths) for a planetary rover vehicle. The display provides the operator with necessary information about the terrain and indicates violations of operational or dynamic constraints on the rover. The operator can select different kinds of two-dimensional maps as well as a perspective view of the rover environment to plan the traversals. An experiment has been carried out to determine the ability of the operator to estimate the rover attitude in a large variety of situations. It turned out that the estimation error is highly dependent on the rover attitude itself. This result can be used to determine a vertical scale for the perspective representation of the terrain which avoids an underestimation of dangerous rover attitudes.