Autonomous Rover Navigation on Unknown Terrains: Functions and Integration

Abstract

Autonomous long-range navigation in partially known planetary-like terrains is still an open challenge for robotics. Navigating hundreds of meters without any human intervention requires the robot to be able to build various representations of its environment, to plan and execute trajectories according to the kind of terrain traversed, to control its motions and to localize itself as it moves. All these activities have to be scheduled, triggered, controlled and interrupted according to the rover context. In this paper, we briefly review some functionalities that have been developed in our laboratory, and implemented on board the Marsokhod model robot, Lama. We then present how the various concurrent instances of the perception, localization and motion generation functionalities are integrated. Experimental results illustrate the functionalities throughout the paper.