AUTONOMOUS EXPLORATION BEHAVIOR PLANNING FOR PLANETARY ROVER

This paper proposes an efficient scheme to make a routing and sensing plan simultaneously for lunar or planetary exploration rovers. In the proposed scheme, the environment is widely recognized by using a vision system. The proposed algorithm can detect obstacles based on gray-level image. And a rough route is produced by judging whether the area is safe or dangerous. Firstly, the shade average and the variance at each pixel are calculated from the obtained image, and the environment recognition is performed. According to the recognition results, a rough path and a sensing strategy are planned. A rover senses locally based on the proposed behaviour and moves to the destination. The validity of the proposed method is shown by some computer simulations.