Monocular Vision-based Estimation of Wheel Slip Ratio for Planetary Rovers in Soft Terrain

Vision-based Localization and Terrain Modeling for Planetary Rovers

Multi-Sensor Terrain Estimation for Planetary Rovers

Future planetary exploration missions will require rovers to perform difficult tasks in rough terrain, with limited human supervision. Knowledge of terrain physical characteristics would allow a rover to adapt its control and planning strategies to maximize its effectiveness. This paper describes recent and current work at MIT in the area of terrain estimation and sensing. A method for on-line ...

Visual Motion Estimation and Terrain Modeling for Planetary Rovers

The next round of planetary missions will require increased autonomy to enable exploration rovers to travel great distances with limited aid from a human operator. For autonomous operations at this scale, localization and terrain modeling become key aspects of onboard rover functionality. Previous Mars rover missions have relied on odometric sensors such as wheel encoders and inertial measureme...

On-Line Terrain Parameter Estimation for Planetary Rovers

Future planetary exploration missions will require rovers to traverse very rough terrain with limited human supervision. Wheel-terrain interaction plays a critical role in rough-terrain mobility. In this paper an on-line estimation method that identifies key terrain parameters using on-board rover sensors is presented. These parameters can be used for accurate traversability prediction or in a ...

Terrain Adaptive Navigation for planetary rovers

This paper describes the design, implementation, and experimental results of a navigation system for planetary rovers called Terrain Adaptive Navigation (TANav). This system was designed to enable greater access to and more robust operations within terrains of widely varying slippage. The system achieves this goal by using onboard stereo cameras to remotely classify surrounding terrain, predict...