Laurence Tyler

PRoViScout: a planetary scouting rover demonstrator

Mobile systems exploring Planetary surfaces in future will require more autonomy than today. The EU FP7-SPACE Project ProViScout (2010-2012) establishes the building blocks of such autonomous exploration systems in terms of robotics vision by a decision-based combination of navigation and scientific target selection, and integrates them into a framework ready for and exposed to field demonstration. The PRoViScout on-board system consists of mission management components such as an Executive, a Mars Mission On-Board Planner and Scheduler, a Science Assessment Module, and Navigation & Vision Processing modules. The platform hardware consists of the rover with the sensors and pointing devices. We report on the major building blocks and their functions & interfaces, emphasizing on the computer vision parts such as image acquisition (using a novel zoomed 3D-Time-of-Flight & RGB camera), mapping from 3D-TOF data, panoramic image & stereo reconstruction, hazard and slope maps, visual odometry and the recognition of potential scientifically interesting targets.

Autonomous Science Target Identification and Acquisition (ASTIA) for planetary exploration

We introduce an autonomous planetary exploration software architecture being developed for the purpose of autonomous science target identification and surface sample acquisition. Our motivation is to maximise planetary science data return whilst minimising the need for ground-based human intervention during long duration planetary robotic exploration missions. Our Autonomous Science Target Identification and Acquisition (ASTIA) architecture incorporates a number of key software components which support 2D and 3D image processing; autonomous science target identification based upon science instrument captured data; a robot manipulator control software agent, and an architecture software executive. ASTIA is being developed and tested within our Trans-National Planetary Analogue Terrain Laboratory (PATLab). This provides an analogue Martian terrain, and a rover chassis with onboard manipulator, cameras and computing hardware. Experimentation results with ASTIA and our PATLab rover are presented.