Visually Guided Reaching for an Autonomous Mars Rover

This thesis describes the design and implementation of an engineering solution to the problem of autonomous geological sampling with a manipulator mounted on a robot Mars Rover. Most of the research to date in the field of remote manipulation has focused on teleoperated technologies. The Pebbles Mars Rover project pushes the envelope of autonomous operation instead, in the interests of drastically reducing operation time and costs. The following implementation of rock collection by the Pebbles rover, in the absence of human control, using a five degree-of-freedom arm with a parallel jaw gripper and a single “eye-on-hand” camera is aimed at showing the viability of this approach. The implementation has three main components: a vision algorithm for rock detection, a visual servoing mechanism to reach to the rock, and a dextrous manipulation scheme to grasp the rock. The thesis will present the design of these three components separately and describe how they operate together. It will also present performance data and results for the operation of these components. Thesis Supervisor: Rodney A. Brooks Title: Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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