Rover Navigation

 Rover Navigation

Without little green men to conquer, National Geographic Emerging Explorer and planetary geologist Bethany Ehlmann has been free to direct NASA’s Curiosity rover simply to study the ancient rocks and environment of our cool red neighbor.

The Curiosity rover is now using its Autonav software to navigate on MarTs | NASA JPL Mars Space Science

Demonstration of the software used on the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) for computer navigation through the terrain on mars without humans in the loop. Mark Maimone is the PI of the project and the animation is by Jack Morrison. I helped with morphin and dstar development at CMU back in 1998-99

This animation is the view enjoyed by the Remote Control Centre of the rover being tested in Chile’s Atacama Desert during October 2013’s five-day Sample Acquisition Field Experiment with a Rover — SAFER — trial. The sequence, produced by the ‘Overseer’ planning, monitoring and control software produced by UK partner SCISYS begins with panoramic imagery from the rover’s PanCam, shifting to output from its autonomous navigation software including path-planning hazard maps, digital terrain models, localisation positions plus navcam images. Finally the radargram produced by the rover’s ground penetrating radar is overlaid onto the 3D terrain. The playback has been set to 16 times real time. The background digital elevation model of the site was obtained by RAL Space using a flying drone.

Credit: ESA / SCISYS / UKSA

One of the more challenging aspects of developing flight software (FSW) for NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) and Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover was how to enable them to drive themselves safely through unknown Martian terrain. When the MER mission was approved in the year 2000, JPL researchers had already demonstrated that capability on prototype rovers [1] using software written primarily in C++ on a VxWorks realtime O/S platform with shared memory. So when asked to incorporate that capability into the MER vehicles which also relied on a similar VxWorks realtime O/S, the team concluded it would be safest and most expedient to incorporate the already field-tested C++ software. But that presented a challenge, since at that point all rover FSW development was mandated to be done mainly in the C programming language.

On 29 April 2016, ESA astronaut Tim Peake will take part in an experiment dubbed ‘SUPVIS-M’ (Supervisory Control of Mars Yard Rover) in which he will operate, from the International Space Station (ISS), a UK-built rover – Bridget – located in the Airbus Mars Yard in Stevenage, UK.

The experiment is part of Europe’s METERON (Multipurpose End-To-end Robotics Operations Network) project, which aims to prepare for future human-robotic missions to the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies. Considerations such as which tasks are robotic and which human, and what data are needed to support the monitoring and control of assets, like vehicles on a planetary surface, will feed directly into plans for future exploration initiatives and the design of mission systems. Prior to the live rover control from the ISS, Tim Peake was shown this video to provide him a general overview of how the rover works and to familiarise him with the space-to-ground data links. Part of the experiment aims to study how humans naturally and extemporaneously interact with robotic systems, so this video provides a general overview in just sufficient detail to enable him to get started.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoNHzi-50hY&feature=youtu.be

Our submission shows the developmental process of an assisted autonomy system for an experimental mars rover (EMR) with MATLAB and Simulink. The primary objective of the project was to give the EMR the ability to follow a generated path. Alongside this primary objective was the development of an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for improving state estimation of a localisation system which is used by the EMR. In the video we show how MATLAB and Simulink allowed us to effectively create an entire system from initial design, to simulation, to final deployment onto hardware