Planetary Rover Workshop (W-F01)

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Barcelona, Spain

22 April 2005

Abstract

With the recent success of the NASA Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), it is clear that future planetary surface exploration will employ mobile robots. This workshop will present recent results from Mars operations, as well as terrestrial field tests expanding the envelope of systems' performance. Topics to be addressed include autonomous navigation and mobility in rough terrain, 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, precision position estimation without GPS, computation restricted software performance, power restricted system performance, and telemetry restricted remote commanding. While the current target of much research is Mars exploration, application to other planetary surfaces is foreseeable.

Organizer

Richard Volpe

Mobility & Robotics Systems Section Manager

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

California Institute of Technology

volpe@jpl.nasa.gov

https://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/~volpe/

Motivation and Objective

To gather representatives of the robotics community, investigating new capabilities in autonomous planetary surface mobile robotics. Through presentation of results from large ongoing efforts, and through discussion with attendees, we intend to capture a description of the current state of the art, and a sense of the challenges which still need to be addressed.

List of topics covered

- Natural terrain navigation

- Terrain relative precision position estimation

- System design and software integration

- Command and control with limited bandwidth

- Field tests on Earth and Mars

Presentations

Speaker	Institution	Topic	Video
Richard Volpe	JPL, Caltech	Intro & Welcome
Richard Volpe	JPL, Caltech	Mars Rover Technology Infusion	dir
Mark Maimone	JPL, Caltech	MER Mobility and Surface Autonomy: Capabilities and Results	dir
Liam Pedersen	NASA Ames	Targeting Rocks - Robotic Exploration Challenges	dir
David Wettergreen	CMU	Field Experiments in Robotic Astrobiology	dir
Roland Siegwart and Pierre Lamon	EPFL	Locomotion Concepts, Motion Control and 3D Odometry for Planetary Rovers	dir
Simon Lacroix	LAAS	An experimental comparison of stereovision odometry approaches	dir
Giovanni Muscato	Univ of Catania	The Robovolc project: Results on the exploration of volcanoes and similarities with planetary surfaces	dir
Takashi Kubota	ISAS / JAXA	Asteroid Exploration Rover	dir

Other Information

• Attendee list
• Workshop flyer

Relation to previous ICRA and IROS workshops

I hosted a similar workshop at IROS 1997, after the Pathfinder Mission with the Sojourner Rover. Three of the presenters of this workshop were presenters at that workshop, providing a good comparison of progress in the 8 year interval.
See https://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mwm/rover/iros97.html for details.