Rover Relocalization for Mars Sample Return by Virtual Template Synthesis and Matching
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究实验室）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory（喷气推进实验室）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
Tu-Hoa Pham, William Seto, Shreyansh Daftry, Barry Ridge, Johanna Hansen, Tristan Thrush, Mark Van der Merwe, Gerard Maggiolino, Alexander Brinkman, John Mayo, … 展开作者
Tu-Hoa Pham, William Seto, Shreyansh Daftry, Barry Ridge, Johanna Hansen, Tristan Thrush, Mark Van der Merwe, Gerard Maggiolino, Alexander Brinkman, John Mayo, Yang Cheng, Curtis Padgett, Eric Kulczycki, Renaud Detry
备注：
To appear in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2021)
We consider the problem of rover relocalization in the context of the notional Mars Sample Return campaign. In this campaign, a rover (R1) needs to be capable of autonomously navigating and localizing itself within an area of approximately 50 x 50 m using reference images collected years earlier by another rover (R0). We propose a visual localizer that exhibits robustness to the relatively barren terrain that we expect to find in relevant areas, and to large lighting and viewpoint differences between R0 and R1. The localizer synthesizes partial renderings of a mesh built from reference R0 images and matches those to R1 images. We evaluate our method on a dataset totaling 2160 images covering the range of expected environmental conditions (terrain, lighting, approach angle). Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach. This work informs the Mars Sample Return campaign on the choice of a site where Perseverance (R0) will place a set of sample tubes for future retrieval by another rover (R1).
BRAC University (BRACU) has participated in the University Rover Challenge (URC), a robotics competition for university level students organized by the Mars Society to design and build a rover that would be of use to early explorers on Mars. BRACU has designed and developed a full functional next-generation mars rover, Mongol Tori, which can be operated in the extreme, hostile condition expected in planet Mars. Not only has Mongol Tori embedded with both autonomous and manual controlled features to functionalize, it can also capable of conducting scientific tasks to identify the characteristic…
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency（日本宇宙航空研究开发机构）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）
In addition to conventional ground rovers, the Mars 2020 mission will send a helicopter to Mars. The copter's high-resolution data helps the rover to identify small hazards such as steps and pointy rocks, as well as providing rich textual information useful to predict perception performance. In this paper, we consider a three-agent system composed of a Mars rover, copter, and orbiter. The objective is to provide good localization to the rover by selecting an optimal path that minimizes the localization uncertainty accumulation during the rover's traverse. To achieve this goal, we quantify the …
Semi or completely autonomous unmanned vehicles, remotely driven or controlled through artificial intelligence, are instrumental to foster space exploration. One of the most essential tasks of a rover is terrain traversing which requires the need of efficient suspension systems. This communication presents a suspension system giving degrees of freedom to every wheel with the help of linear actuators connected through bell crank levers. The actuation of linear actuators directly varies the height of every wheel from the chassis hence offering articulation to the rover. A control system is devel…
The successes of previous and current Mars rovers have encouraged space agencies worldwide to pursue additional planetary exploration missions with more ambitious navigation goals. For example, NASA's planned Mars Sample Return mission will be a multi-year undertaking that will require a solar-powered rover to drive over 150 metres per sol for approximately three months. This paper reviews the mobility planning framework used by current rovers and surveys the major challenges involved in continuous long-distance navigation on the Red Planet. It also discusses recent work related to environment…
Jet Propulsion Laboratory（喷气推进实验室）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Ècole Normale Supèrieure de Paris（巴黎高等师范学院）；Indian Institute of Technology（印度理工学院）
We present a light-weight body-terrain clearance evaluation algorithm for the automated path planning of NASA's Mars 2020 rover. Extraterrestrial path planning is challenging due to the combination of terrain roughness and severe limitation in computational resources. Path planning on cluttered and/or uneven terrains requires repeated safety checks on all the candidate paths at a small interval. Predicting the future rover state requires simulating the vehicle settling on the terrain, which involves an inverse-kinematics problem with iterative nonlinear optimization under geometric constraints…
West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory（喷气推进实验室）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
Highly accurate real-time localization is of fundamental importance for the safety and efficiency of planetary rovers exploring the surface of Mars. Mars rover operations rely on vision-based systems to avoid hazards as well as plan safe routes. However, vision-based systems operate on the assumption that sufficient visual texture is visible in the scene. This poses a challenge for vision-based navigation on Mars where regions lacking visual texture are prevalent. To overcome this, we make use of the ability of the rover to actively steer the visual sensor to improve fault tolerance and maximi…
Universidad de Málaga（马拉加大学）；Andalucía Tech（安达卢西亚理工大学）；European Space Agency（欧洲空间局）
The goal of the Mars Sample Return campaign is to collect soil samples from the surface of Mars and return them to Earth for further study. The samples will be acquired and stored in metal tubes by the Perseverance rover and deposited on the Martian surface. As part of this campaign, it is expected that the Sample Fetch Rover will be in charge of localizing and gathering up to 35 sample tubes over 150 Martian sols. Autonomous capabilities are critical for the success of the overall campaign and for the Sample Fetch Rover in particular. This work proposes a novel system architecture for the aut…
Wheeled planetary rovers such as the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) and Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) have provided unprecedented, detailed images of the Mars surface. However, these rovers are large and are of high-cost as they need to carry sophisticated instruments and science laboratories. We propose the development of low-cost planetary rovers that are the size and shape of cantaloupes and that can be deployed from a larger rover. The rover named SphereX is 2 kg in mass, is spherical, holonomic and contains a hopping mechanism to jump over rugged terrain. A small low-cost rover complement…
HE Space for ESA – European Space Agency（HE Space 公司（为欧洲空间局））；European Space Agency（欧洲空间局）；University of Malaga（马拉加大学）
This paper proposes a Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) architecture for planetary rovers targeting the conditions of upcoming Mars exploration missions such as Mars 2020 and the Sample Fetching Rover (SFR). The navigation requirements of these missions demand a control architecture featuring autonomous capabilities to achieve a fast and long traverse. The proposed solution presents a two-level architecture where the efficient navigation (low) level is always active and the full navigation (upper) level is enabled according to the difficulty of the terrain. The first level is an efficien…
The Curiosity rover is one of the most complex systems successfully deployed in a planetary exploration mission to date. It was sent by NASA to explore the surface of Mars and to identify potential signs of life. Even though it has limited autonomy on-board, most of its decisions are made by the ground control team. This hinders the speed at which the Curiosity reacts to its environment, due to the communication delays between Earth and Mars. Depending on the orbital position of both planets, it can take 4--24 minutes for a message to be transmitted between Earth and Mars. If the Curiosity wer…
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（喷气推进实验室，加州理工学院）；Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）
Planetary rover systems need to perform terrain segmentation to identify drivable areas as well as identify specific types of soil for sample collection. The latest Martian terrain segmentation methods rely on supervised learning which is very data hungry and difficult to train where only a small number of labeled samples are available. Moreover, the semantic classes are defined differently for different applications (e.g., rover traversal vs. geological) and as a result the network has to be trained from scratch each time, which is an inefficient use of resources. This research proposes a sem…
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）
Tactful coordination on earth between hundreds of operators from diverse disciplines and backgrounds is needed to ensure that Martian rovers have a high likelihood of achieving their science goals while enduring the harsh environment of the red planet. The operations team includes many individuals, each with independent and overlapping objectives, working to decide what to execute on the Mars surface during the next planning period. The team must work together to understand each other's objectives and constraints within a fixed time period, often requiring frequent revision. This study examine…
Planetary exploration missions with Mars rovers are complicated, which generally require elaborated task planning by human experts, from the path to take to the images to capture. NASA has been using this process to acquire over 22 million images from the planet Mars. In order to improve the degree of automation and thus efficiency in this process, we propose a system for planetary rovers to actively search for prominence of prespecified scientific features in captured images. Scientists can prespecify such search tasks in natural language and upload them to a rover, on which the deployed syst…
Learning to Drive on Mars: Visual Multimodal Traversability Estimation for Off-World Navigation
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）；Washington State University（华盛顿州立大学）
Exploration of Mars has been made possible using a series of landers, rovers and orbiters. The HiRise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has captured high-resolution images covering large tracts of the surface. However, orbital images lack the depth and rich detail obtained from in-situ exploration. Rovers such as Mars Science Laboratory and upcoming Mars 2020 carry state-of-the-art science laboratories to perform in-situ exploration and analysis. However, they can only cover a small area of Mars through the course of their mission. A critical capability gap exists in our ability …
Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院自主系统实验室）；Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心机器人与机电一体化研究所）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
UWB Anchor Based Localization of a Planetary Rover
Julius Maximilian University Würzburg（维尔zburg尤利乌斯-马克西米利安大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt（维尔茨堡-施韦因富特应用技术大学）；Austrian Space Forum（奥地利空间论坛）
School of Earth and Space Exploration（地球与空间探索学院）；Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；National Institute of Technology Karnataka（卡纳塔克邦国家理工学院）
Remote sample recovery is a rapidly evolving application of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) for planetary sciences and space exploration. Development of cyber-physical systems (CPS) for autonomous deployment and recovery of sensor probes for sample caching is already in progress with NASA's MARS 2020 mission. To challenge student teams to develop autonomy for sample recovery settings, the 2020 NSF CPS Challenge was positioned around the launch of the MARS 2020 rover and sUAS duo. This paper discusses perception and trajectory planning for sample recovery by sUAS in a simulation environm…
Opening the Black Box of 3D Reconstruction Error Analysis with VECTOR
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Wētā FX（维塔数码）；Art Center College of Design（艺术中心设计学院）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory（喷气推进实验室）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Using physics-based simulation towards eliminating empiricism in extraterrestrial terramechanics applications
School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学船舶海洋与建筑工程学院）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Ames Research Center, NASA（美国国家航空航天局艾姆斯研究中心）；NASA, Glenn Research Center（美国国家航空航天局格伦研究中心）；ProtoInnovations, LLC（ProtoInnovations有限责任公司）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
