Path planning with risk consideration on hopping mobility

Recently, a small size hopping rover is received attention for the moon and planetary exploration society. In a low gravity environment, a lightweight hopping rover might have high traversabilities: by jumping over long distance and obstacles. While a lot of hardware designs for hopping system are presented, few software designs for its system are presented. For the near future, software design for the rover is necessary to satisfy some requirements including sensing and navigation. A hopping rover has more uncertainties than conventional wheeled rover because a hopping movement is fundamentally different from a wheeled movement. Its uncertainties might be risks for the rover, in addition, it is difficult to reduce uncertainties because of its payload and hopping behavior. In this paper, we focus the navigation on hopping software system, and discuss about hopping movement with some uncertainties. Next, we propose the determination method of landing position using the geometric features of the triangle. The method is considered risks for the rover. We confirmed effectiveness of path planning with proposal method by simulation.

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