Experimental Study on Visual Navigation for Exploration Robot

Explorers on unknown natural terrain such as Volcanoes or Planets are expected to have ability to move as widely as possible autonomously. This paper presents future lunar or planetary robotics exploration by surface explorer. This paper proposes an efficient vision based navigation method to recognize environments, to create a map, and to plan a routing. And also obstacle avoidance experiments by a small robot are conducted. The validity and effectiveness of the proposed navigation schemes are shown by some experiments.