Design and analysis of a sun sensor for planetary rover absolute heading detection

Abstract

This paper describes a new sun sensor for absolute heading detection developed for the Field Integrated, Design and Operations (FIDO) rover. The FIDO rover is an advanced technology rover that is a terrestrial prototype of the rovers NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) plans to send to Mars in 2003. Our goal was to develop a sun sensor that fills the current cost/performance gap, uses the power of subpixel interpolation, makes use of current hardware on the rover, and demands very little computational overhead. The need for a sun sensor on planetary rovers lies in the fact that current means of estimating the heading of planetary rovers involves integration of noisy rotational-speed measurements. This noise causes error to accumulate and grow rapidly. Moreover, the heading error affects the estimate of the and position of the rover. More importantly, incremental odometry heading estimation is only reliable over relatively short distances. There is an urgent need to develop a new heading-detection sensor for long traverses [for example, 100 m per Sol (Martian Day)], as requested for future Mars mission. Results of a recent FIDO field trial at Black Rock Summit in Central Nevada and several operations readiness tests at the JPL MarsYard using the sun sensor have demonstrated threefold to fourfold improvement in the heading estimation of the rover compared to incremental odometry.

What do color changes reveal about an outdoor scene?

“…Estimating the geographic location and orientation of a camera from a timestamped image sequence has rarely been considered. Cozman and Krotkov [5] extract sun altitudes from images and use them to estimate camera latitude and longitude (geolocation), and Trebi-Ollennu et al [17] describe a system for planetary rovers that estimates camera orientation in a celestial coordinate system (geo-orientation). Both systems assume that the sun is visible in the images.…”

Visual odometry aided by a sun sensor and inclinometer

“…These tests experimentally verified that the use of an absolute orientation sensor can restrict the positional error of a rover to grow linearly. Additionally, Trebi-Ollennu et al (2001) describe the design and testing of a sun sensor on one of the FIDO rover platforms, reporting errors in rover heading of a few degrees. However, to economize, the MERs were launched without dedicated sun sensors and instead use the PANCAM stereo camera pair to search for and acquire images of the sun (Eisenman et al, 2002).…”

Celestial Navigation Methods for Space Explorers

“…A localization method in combination with absolute and relative positions (LAR) for lunar rover is provided in [34] , which estimates the position and azimuth of a lunar rover by combination with planet observation and dead reckoning. A lunar rover pose estimation method by fusion of gyro sensor and the Sun direction sensor based on an EKF is presented in [35] . In [36] , extensive analysis, simulation and experimental results of a new planetary rover sun sensor for absolute heading detection are presented.…”