The Mars Exploration Rover instrument positioning system

Manipulation and Control

“…The successful instrument deployment device (IDD) as shown in Figure 5.4 has been used in the two MERs and has accommodated 5 DOFs with an overall length of 0.7 m and a mass of 4.2 kg [5]. It accommodated a range of payload and was tasked to deploy them directly to target locations onto rocks and the surface.…”

“…The algorithm requires two models: a kinematic model of the robot and a geometrical model with the robot rigid bodies (collision model). In References [5,67], the self-collision mechanism used at the Mars Rovers Opportunity and Spirit to avoid collisions between the manipulator and the rover is described.…”

“…The MERs (Spirit and Opportunity) combined ground-based motion planning sequences (i.e., LoA E1) with autonomous onboard motion planning (i.e., LoA E4) [5,79,80]. The E4 motion planning is only used for the rover navigation on board, while the robotic arm motion planning is performed on ground at E1 and the onboard software only checks for collisions between arm and rover before executing the trajectories.…”

Inspection with Robotic Microscopic Imaging

“…Several other visual tracking techniques have been developed or evaluated specificaIIy for precision navigation to science targets with surface rovers [2][ 17][2 1] [7]. Precision manipulation for planetary rover arms has a!so been addressedE221, including the current state-of-the-art instrument arm positioning for the MER rovers [3]. Much of this development is done within, or using, the CLARAty software f?amework [32].…”

“…Once the !eve1 3 registration converges, the level 2 images are registered, again up to rotation and scale. In order to initialize the search at level 2, we start with the rotation angle recovered at level 3 and multiply the translation parameters by 2 to account for the difference in scale at the next pyramid level. The same procedure followed at level 1, and the final registration is a search for the fill homography at level 0 ( h l l resolution), initialized by H;.…”