STEREOVISION BY CORRELATION APPROACH ON-BOARD PERCEPTION SYSTEM CONCEPT AND

l%is paper presents a link part of the work currently developed at CEA. CNRS, IW, Oh’ERA and CNES in the framework of the Autonomous Planetary Rover program (V.A.P.). In the$rst part of the paper, a system concept approach for the VAP applicanbn is quickly presented. lhe second part is a special focus on the V.A.P. Perception System where we discuss and show some of the results obtained with the stereovision by correlation algorithm on outdoor simulated Mars terrain scenes. The overall program covers all the topics necessary for the design of an intervention robot such as a Mars rover. So, within the framework of Mars exploration, due to the significant time delay transmission and to terrain characteristics, the robotic challenge is to provide the highest degree of autonomy to the planetary rover [2]. In this paper, we try first to give a quick overview of a typical mission and of the associated system concept. In a second part, we describe the last improvements and associated tests results of a stereovision algorithm based on correlation technique.