1P2-K01 Cooperation between Heterogenous Robots for Efficient Planetary Exploration(Space Robotics)
Paudel Saroj, Takashi Kubota · The Proceedings of JSME annual Conference on Robotics and Mechatronics (Robomec) · 2014
In future planetary missions, to increase the capability of exploration, co-operation among different types of exploration vehicles like orbiter, lander, and rover will be required. Because of the mobility and their deployment on the surface, rovers are favored. Cooperative approach seems to be more effective than using a single rover as each over adds a different perspective of the environment being explored. This paper presents ongoing works on cooperative Mars exploration using a conventional rover and a jumping robot. A jumping robot provides an additional aerial perspective much closer to the surface as compared to the orbiter. Added to that, a jumping robot has greater mobility than a conventional one. The data obtained from these two perspectives are then used for localization, mapping and path planning. In this paper some of the simulation results on visual odometry for jumping robot and cooperative path planning are presented.