Introduction

Planetary Rovers are very far away from Earth. As we cannot exceed the speed of light, real time remote control of the rover is not possible. It is therefore important for the rover to be autonomous. The minimum requirement for it being autonomous is that it can navigate safely and effectively in an unknown environment. It must collect and learn all the data itself. Here is an outline of steps that the rover needs to do.

1. Collect as much information from the environment as possible using onboard sensors.
2. Processes these information, work out its location, terrain of the surroundings.
3. Plan out a route to get to its assigned check points and perform required tasks.

The navigation of the rovers will be explained in two main categories, sensors and navigation software (GESTALT) . We will start with sensors.

Capabilities of a rover

The rover only has to forward simple comment given by scientist on Earth. This is a very simple task to do if we can control it in real time, but due the communication delay of about 20 minutes from Earth to Mars, it is not possible... Read more

Sensor - Sun angle sensor

Currently, there are a lot of sensors employed in the Mars rover. Main sensors that are used on current Rovers include stereo vision sensor, sun angle sensor, inertial sensor, angular rate sensor and wheel motion (current) sensor... Read more

Stereo vision

With cameras and GESTALT, it's similar to giving the rovers "eyes" and a brain to access the local terrain and identify any possible hazard.
Currently on the two rovers that are operating on Mars, they have nine cameras on board.... Read more

Vehicle Kinematics and Position estimation

Vehicle kinematics is studied in order to compute the wheel rotation needed to achieve the desired movement and the steering angle of the rover. The computation for a rover is very complex because it is travelling on a deformable terrain.... Read more

Improvement on navigation

There are a few navigation technologies that are under development, e.g. GPS Self-Calibrating Pseudolite Arrays by Stanford University Aerospace Robotics Laboratory (ARL) , landmark-based and star tracking navigation system by Carnegie... Read more