ICRA08 Planetary Rovers Workshop

2008 International Conference on Robotics and Automation

Pasadena, California

Monday, May 19, 2008 (full day)

Abstract

With the continued success of the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), plans for the NASA Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) and ESA ExoMars, and return to the Moon, it is clear that future planetary surface exploration will employ mobile robots.  Additionally, aerial mobility for Titan or Venus, or sampling operations from fixed landers such as Phoenix, are very similar to rover based operations and, therefore, relevant to the discussion. 

This workshop will present recent results from Mars surface operations, future surface and aerial mission designs, as well as related results from terrestrial field tests.  Topics to be addressed include autonomous navigation and mobility in natural environments, autonomous manipulation for instrument placement and sample acquisition, autonomous science data processing, system design and architecture, and operations interface design and use.  Core technologies include natural terrain sensing, novel mobility system designs, computation-restricted software performance, power-restricted system performance, and telemetry-restricted remote commanding.  While the current target of much research is Mars and Moon exploration, discussion of application to other planetary bodies is desirable.

Organizer:

Richard Volpe

Mobility and Robotic Systems Section

  Jet Propulsion Laboratory

California Institute of Technology

  Pasadena, CA 91109 USA

volpe@jpl.nasa.gov

https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/

Motivation and Objective:

While planetary robotics exploration is an extremely costly endeavor, there is a relatively small part of the mainstream robotics community involved in this arena.  Many reasons exist for this reality, but one of the issues is a lack of engagement with the community on the relevant issues driving the scientific objectives, or acting as obstacles to progress.  Such lack of appreciation can also exist within the space robotics community itself, where different mission constraints are unique and distract attention away from similar problems and endeavors elsewhere.  For instance, solutions for Mars and Moon exploration seem very similar as robotics problems, but other realities including cost, communication distances, thermal and radiation environments, planetary motions, and target system usage, can all lead to drastically different solutions. 

Therefore, it is highly desirable to have an unhurried, detailed, technical exchange between space robotics system developers.  Such an exchange is intended not to look like simply another, invited session in a conference full of sessions.  Rather the intent is to allow for much longer and more detailed presentations with time for insightful comments and questions from others building or operating similar systems, or wanting to learn more about this field. 

Also, as is the practice of true workshops, it is desired to have breakout sessions on specific sub topics, in an attempt to capture the pulse of this community regarding current concerns, frustrations, successes, and vision of the future.  The ability to do this will be dependent on the attendance.

Presentations

Author	Presenter	Organization	Topic	doc	mov
Richard Volpe		NASA JPL	Introduction to the Planetary Rovers Workshop
Brian Wilcox		NASA JPL	ATHLETE: An Option for Mobile Lunar Habitats	x	10
Rob Ambrose		NASA JSC	Crew Mobility for Lunar Surface Exploration	x	28
Terry Fong		NASA ARC	Field Testing of Utility Robots for  Lunar Surface Operations	x	1
David Thompson and David Wettergreen	David Thompson	CMU	A Tale of Two Rovers: Mission Scenarios for Kilometer-Scale Site Survey	x	15
Takashi Kubota, Yasuharu Kunii, Yoji Kuroda	Takashi Kubota	JAXA / ISAS / JSPEC	Rover Missions and Technology for Lunar or Planetary Surface Exploration	x
Kazuya Yoshida, Keiji Nagatani, and Genya Ishigami	Kazuya Yoshida	Tohoku University	Terramechanics Based Analysis and Motion Control of Rovers  on Loose Soil	x
Mark Maimone		NASA JPL	Challenges for Planetary Rover Navigation	x
Anders Elfving		ESA, ESTEC	ExoMars:  ESA’s mission to search for signs of life on Mars	x	1
Tara Estlin et al.	Tara Estlin	NASA JPL	Autonomous Science for Mars Rovers	x	1
Ambroise Krebs, Thomas Thueer, Cedric Pradalier, and Roland Siegwart	CedricPradalier	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich	Evaluation of Mobility Concepts for a Martian Rover	x	1
Andreas Birk et al.	Andreas Birk	Jacobs University Bremen	Terrain Classification for Autonomous Robot Mobility	x	2

Participants:

For a complete list of 2008 participants in this workshop, click here.

Relation to Previous Workshops:

This follows similar workshops at IROS 1997, ICRA 2005, and ICRA 2007.  For details, see

https://ewh.ieee.org/conf/icra/2007/workshops/SpaceRobotics/

https://ewh.ieee.org/conf/ras2005/workshops/PlanetaryRovers/index.html and

https://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mwm/rover/iros97.html