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Spatial Coverage Planning for a Planetary Rover
We are developing onboard planning and execution technologies to support the exploration and characterization of geological features by autonomous rovers. In order to generate high quality mission plans, an autonomous rover must reason about the relative importance of the observations it can perform. In this paper we look at the scientific criteria of selecting observations that improve the quality of the area covered by samples. Our approach makes use of a priori information, if available, and allows scientists to mark sub-regions of the area with relative priorities for exploration. We use an efficient algorithm for prioritizing observations based on spatial coverage that allows the system to update observation rankings as new information is gained during execution.
Our Home with the Robots: From Planetary Rovers to Self-Driving Cars
Presents high-level overview of research at NASA Ames on human-robot teaming, ranging from crew-controlled surface telerobotics to remote assistance for self-driving cars.
Development of the Resource Prospector Planetary Rover
The Resource Prospector (RP) is an In-‐Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) lunar rover mission under study by NASA. RP is planned to launch in 2020 to prospect for subsurface volatiles and to extract oxygen from lunar regolith. The mission will address several of NASA's "Strategic Knowledge Gaps" for lunar exploration. The mission will also address the Global Exploration Roadmap's strategic goal of using local resources for human exploration. The distribution of lunar subsurface volatiles drives the mission requirement for mobility. The spatial distribution is hypothesized to be governed by impact cratering with the top 0.5 m being patchy at scales of 100 m. The mixing time scale increases with depth (less frequent larger impacts). Consequently, increased mobility reduces the depth requirement for sampling. The target RP traverse will extend 1 km radially from the landing site to sample craters of varying sizes. Sampling craters with different ages will reveal possible volatile emplacement history. In 1 Ga, approximately 60-70 craters of 10 m diameter form per km2. Thus, the rover will need to sample at least ten of these craters, which may require a total traverse path length of 2-‐3 km. During 2014-2015, we developed an initial prototype rover for RP. The current design is a solar powered, four-wheeled vehicle, with hub motor drive, offset four wheel steering, and active suspension. Active suspension provides capabilities including changing vehicle ride height, traversing comparatively large obstacles, and controlling load on the wheels. All-wheel steering enables the vehicle to point arbitrarily while roving, e.g., to keep the solar array pointed at the sun while in motion. The offset steering combined with active suspension improves driving in soft soil. The rover's on-board software utilizes NASA's Core Flight Software, which is a reusable flight software environment. During 2015, we completed the initial rover software build, which provides low-level hardware interfaces, basic mobility control, waypoint driving, odometry, basic error checking, and camera services. Development of the prototype rover has enabled maturation of many of the subsystems to TRL 5. During the next year, we will conduct integrated testing of concepts of operation, navigation, and remote driving tools. In addition, we will perform environmental tests including radiation (avionics), thermal and thermal/vacuum (mechanisms), and gravity offload (mobility).
Traversability index: a new concept for planetary rovers
Traversability index is introduced in this paper as a new and simple measure for traversability of natural terrains by mobile robots.
Thermal testing of a planetary rover screw for the Mars 2020 Rover sample caching system
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Planetary Rover Simulation for Lunar Exploration Missions
Overview of synthetic lunar terrain generation methods used for the Resource Prospector and Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover projects.
Constraint-based Brittleness Analysis of Task Networks for Planetary Rovers
We propose a new method to analyze brittleness of task networks with respect to not only temporal but any arbitrary set of constraints. The method allows the detection and enumeration of activities that, with modest duration variation, violate the target constraints.
Constraint-based Brittleness Analysis of Task Networks for Planetary Rovers
No abstract provided
Analyzing the effectiveness of rescheduling and Flexible Execution methods to address uncertainty in execution duration for a planetary rover
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