Research on Autonomous Navigation of Lunar Rovers for the Moon Exploration

In order to explore the moon more efficiently, it is very important to endow lunar rovers with increased autonomy both for exploration achievement of scientific goals and for safe navigation. In this paper, autonomous navigation techniques for lunar rovers are discussed, and an autonomous navigation scheme is presented. First, algorithm and technique of initial position determination of lunar rovers are introduced. Then, matched-features set is build by multi steps of image processing such as feature detection, feature tracking and feature matching. Based on the analysis of the image processing error, a two-stage estimation algorithm is used to estimate the motion, robust linear motion estimation is executed to estimate the motion initially and to reject the outliers, and Levenberg-Marquardt nonlinear estimation is used to estimate the motion precisely. The sun sensor is used to update the rover's heading periodically for long range navigation. Next, a weighted ZSSD algorithm is presented to estimate the image disparities by analyzing the traditional ZSSD. Finally, a virtual simulation system is constructed using the development tool of Open Inventor, this simulation system can provide stereo images for simulations of stereo vision and motion estimation techniques, simulation results are provided and future research work is addressed in the end.

[1]  Eric Krotkov,et al.  Dead reckoning for a lunar rover on uneven terrain , 1996, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[2]  William Whittaker,et al.  SUN-SYNCHRONOUS LUNAR POLAR ROVER AS A FIRST STEP TO RETURN TO THE MOON , 2005 .

[3]  Rachid Deriche,et al.  A Robust Technique for Matching two Uncalibrated Images Through the Recovery of the Unknown Epipolar Geometry , 1995, Artif. Intell..

[4]  Clark F. Olson,et al.  Rover navigation using stereo ego-motion , 2003, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[5]  Carl Christian Liebe,et al.  Sun sensing on the Mars exploration rovers , 2002, Proceedings, IEEE Aerospace Conference.

[6]  Dana H. Ballard,et al.  Computer Vision , 1982 .

[7]  Maarten Vergauwen,et al.  A micro-rover navigation and control system for autonomous planetary exploration , 2004, Adv. Robotics.

[8]  Tang Li.  Image Dense Stereo Matching by Technique of Region Growing , 2004 .

[9]  Maarten Vergauwen,et al.  A stereo-vision system for support of planetary surface exploration , 2001, Machine Vision and Applications.

[10]  James R. Bergen,et al.  Visual odometry , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2004. CVPR 2004..

[11]  Larry H. Matthies,et al.  Visual odometry on the Mars Exploration Rovers , 2005, 2005 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

[12]  L. Matthies,et al.  Precise Image-Based Motion Estimation for Autonomous Small Body Exploration , 2000 .

[13]  Andrew E. Johnson,et al.  Field Testing of the Mars Exploration Rovers Descent Image Motion Estimation System , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[14]  Larry Matthies,et al.  Stereo vision and rover navigation software for planetary exploration , 2002, Proceedings, IEEE Aerospace Conference.

[15]  Marina Kolesnik,et al.  Algorithmic solution for autonomous vision-based off-road navigation , 1998, Defense, Security, and Sensing.

[16]  Timothy D. Barfoot,et al.  VISUAL MOTION ESTIMATION AND TERRAIN MODELING FOR PLANETARY ROVERS , 2005 .

[17]  Mark Maimone,et al.  Mars exploration rover engineering cameras , 2001, Remote Sensing.

[18]  Clark F. Olson,et al.  Wide-baseline stereo vision for Mars rovers , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) (Cat. No.03CH37453).

[19]  J.J. Biesiadecki,et al.  The Mars Exploration Rover surface mobility flight software driving ambition , 2006, 2006 IEEE Aerospace Conference.

[20]  Larry H. Matthies,et al.  The Mars Exploration Rovers Descent Image Motion Estimation System , 2004, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[21]  Brett Kennedy,et al.  Design and analysis of a sun sensor for planetary rover absolute heading detection , 2001, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[22]  Peter I. Corke,et al.  Omnidirectional visual odometry for a planetary rover , 2004, 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37566).