Enabling continuous planetary rover navigation through FPGA stereo and visual odometry

Howard, Thomas M.; Morfopoulos, Arin C.; Morrison, Jack; Kuwata, Y.; Villalpando, Carlos Y.; Matthies, Larry; McHenry, Michael

doi:10.1109/aero.2012.6187041

Cited by 24 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Although VO can be an accurate method for slip estimation, it is computationally expensive, which can negatively impact the mean rover drive speed (the rover may move slower to process the terrain information). Field‐Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have resulted in an efficient platform to run VO algorithms on planetary exploration rovers . A second limitation of VO is that on featureless scenarios (e.g., sand dunes) or on shadowed areas (e.g., lunar poles), the number of detected and tracked features is low, and can lead to poor accuracy of motion estimate proposed an algorithm that dynamically switches between several detectors increasing the performance of VO in an untextured natural terrain.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Slippage estimation and compensation for planetary exploration rovers. State of the art and future challenges

González

Iagnemma

2017

Journal of Field Robotics

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Future lunar/planetary exploration missions will demand mobile robots with the capability of reaching more challenging science targets and driving farther per day than the current Mars rovers. Among other improvements, reliable slippage estimation and compensation strategies will play a key role in enabling a safer and more efficient navigation. This paper reviews and discusses this body of research in the context of planetary exploration rovers. Previously published state‐of‐the‐art methods that have been validated through field testing are included as exemplary results. Limitations of the current techniques and recommendations for future developments and planetary missions close the survey.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Slippage estimation and compensation for planetary exploration rovers. State of the art and future challenges

González

Iagnemma

2017

Journal of Field Robotics

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“…The missions succeeding in entering an areocentric orbit include, among 1 The NASA Mars 2020 rover will also include an FPGA onboard, possibly with a visual odometry implementation. 2 Considering ESA's Mars exploration plans, with which the present work is highly associated, the forthcoming Exomars mission (Fig. 1) is distinguished into two launches.…”

Section: Scopementioning

confidence: 99%

“…For a thorough presentation of Mars exploratory rovers the reader may refer to the work of Bajracharya et al . The NASA Mars 2020 rover will also include an FPGA onboard, possibly with a visual odometry implementation …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introducing a globally consistent orbital‐based localization system

Boukas

Γαστεράτος

Visentin³

2017

Journal of Field Robotics

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In spite of the good performance of space exploratory missions, open issues still await to be solved. In autonomous or composite semi‐autonomous exploration of planetary land surfaces, rover localization is such an issue. The rovers of these missions (e.g., the MER and MSL) navigate relatively to their landing spot, ignoring their exact position on the coordinate system defined for the celestial body they explore. However, future advanced missions, like the Mars Sample Return, will require the localization of rovers on a global frame rather than the arbitrarily defined landing frame. In this paper we attempt to retrieve the absolute rover's location by identifying matching Regions of Interest (ROIs) between orbital and land images. In particular, we propose a system comprising two parts, an offline and an onboard one, which functions as follows: in advance of the mission a Global ROI Network (GN) is built offline by investigating the satellite images near the predicted touchdown ellipse, while during the mission a Local ROI Network (LN) is constructed counting on the images acquired by the vision system of the rover along its traverse. The last procedure relies on the accurate VO‐based relative rover localization. The LN is then paired with the GN through a modified 2D DARCES algorithm. The system has been assessed on real data collected by the ESA at the Atacama desert. The results demonstrate the system's potential to perform absolute localization, on condition that the area includes discriminative ROIs. The main contribution of this work is the enablement of global localization performed on contemporary rovers without requiring any additional hardware, such as long range LIDARs.

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“…NASA's Mars 2020 rover in particular is planned to include an FPGA implementation of visual odometry that will dramatically reduce computation times [27,63]. The ESA as well is working on an FPGA implementation of visual odometry as part of the SEXTANT activity [64].…”

Section: Visual Odometrymentioning

confidence: 99%