ESP & NASA JPL (IROS 2020)

Jon and Marlin have had a paper from their collaboration with the NASA JPL Robotic Surface Mobility group accepted to IROS 2020. You can read a preprint of the paper and look at some photos from the work in the Mojave Desert on Axel/DuAxel.

The Axel tethered-rover prototype descending a slope in the Mojave Desert.

Authors

M. Paton
M. P. Strub
T. Brown
R. J. Greene
J. Lizewski
V. Patel
J. D. Gammell
I. A. D. Nesnas

Title

Navigation on the line: Traversability analysis and path planning for extreme-terrain rappelling rovers

Publication

Conference: Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Pages: 7034–7041

Date

24 Oct. 31 Dec. 2020

Notes

Best Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics Paper Award Finalist

PDFs

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

Google Scholar

Abstract

Many areas of scientific interest in planetary exploration, such as lunar pits, icy-moon crevasses, and Martian craters, are inaccessible to current wheeled rovers. Rappelling rovers can safely traverse these steep surfaces, but require techniques to navigate their complex terrain. This dynamic navigation is inherently time-critical and communication constraints (e.g. delays and small communication windows) will require planetary systems to have some autonomy.
Autonomous navigation for Martian rovers is well studied on moderately sloped and locally planar surfaces, but these methods do not readily transfer to tethered systems in non-planar 3D environments. Rappelling rovers in these situations have additional challenges, including terrain-tether interaction and its effects on rover stability, path planning and control.
This paper presents novel traversability analysis and path planning algorithms for rappelling rovers operating on steep terrains that account for terrain-tether interaction and the unique stability and reachability constraints of a rapelling system. The system is evaluated with a series of simulations and an analogue mission. In simulation, the planner was shown to reliably find safe paths down a 55 degree slope when a stable tether-terrain configuration exists and never recommended an unsafe path when one did not. In a planetary analogue mission, elements of the system were used to autonomously navigate Axel, a JPL rappelling rover, down a 30 degree slope with 95% autonomy by distance travelled over 46 meters.