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Lunar or planetary exploration missions including landers and rovers have been earnestly under study in Japan. One of the main missions for lunar robotics exploration is to demonstrate the technologies for lunar or planetary surface exploration, which will cover landing technology and surface exploration rover technology. Lunar geologic survey will be also performed for utilization and scientific...
We present a two-step iterative algorithm to estimate the trajectory of a hopping rover. In the first step, a monocular scheme of visual odometry is adapted to estimate an initial portion the hopping trajectory. From this, the parameters for the ballistic motion are recovered, and the trajectory is extrapolated to predict the positions of the rover for the remainder of the hop. In the second step,...
Lunar or planetary exploration missions including landers and rovers are earnestly under studying in Japan. One of main missions for lunar robotics exploration is to demonstrate the technologies for lunar or planetary surface exploration. They will cover landing technology and surface exploration rover technology. Lunar geologic survey will be also performed for utilization and scientific investigation...
The rendezvous and landing missions are very significant for scientific explorations. In such missions, the navigation and guidance based on image data is very important. The spacecraft Hayabusa performed the descent flights to the target asteroid Itokawa in November of 2005. To accurately determine the spacecraft position, a landmark tracking scheme with the help of the ground operation was introduced...
Lunar rovers are required to move on rough terrains such as in craters and rear cliffs where it is scientifically very important to explore. Recently, wheel typed rovers are popular for planetary exploration missions. However, there is a problem that the wheel typed rovers have possibility of stack. Therefore, this paper investigates a mechanism of kinetic behavior between the wheels of the exploration...
Subsurface exploration on the Moon is a significant mission for future space developments. The authors have studied an autonomous robotic explorer which can burrow into the soils. This paper focuses especially on the excavation mechanism of a burrowing robot for near-future lunar subsurface exploration. The main objective of the proposed robot is to bury a scientific observation instrument, such as...
Exploration in the low-gravity environment on an asteroid surface is best achieved by using a hopping rover. Robust and effective control of such a rover will require autonomous navigation, for which accurate localization is an important element. The combination of a hopping platform on an extraterrestrial, low-gravity environment presents unique challenges for the task of localization. In this paper,...
Recently small body exploration missions have received a lot of attention in the world. In small body explorations, especially, detailed in-situ surface exploration by tiny probe is one of effective and fruitful means and is expected to make strong contributions towards scientific studies. JAXA/ISAS is promoting MUSES-C mission, which is the worldpsilas first sample and return attempt to/from the...
This paper presents a mobile robotic system designed to perform deep soil sampling for lunar or planetary subsurface exploration in the near future. Drilling robots have to carry the excavated fine sand, regolith backward because of the high density. Therefore a new scheme is proposed, to move forward under the soil by making use of reactive force caused by pushing the discharged regolith. The first...
Planetary exploration requires rovers to perform a variety of challenging tasks autonomously. In order to complete relevant scientific mission, these rovers need to overcome difficulty for rough terrain traversing by "online methods". This paper discusses an idea that utilizes a rover mobile center of mass in order to aid in traversing rough terrain. According to vehicle pitch angle and...
This paper describes a position identification method to precisely estimate the relative movement onboard of an autonomous explorer in such natural terrain as Moon or Mars. This paper proposes a new map matching scheme that registers the visual information of consecutive robot positions and expresses the robot displacement in a common coordinate system. Local elevation maps of the environment are...
The Japanese asteroid exploration spacecraft Hayabusa autonomously performed touchdown two times in November 2005. The autonomous guidance and navigation capability is installed aboard the spacecraft. The GNC system collects the laser altimeter, laser range finders and navigation cameras information aboard and is designed to estimate where the spacecraft is and to decide the path correction maneuvers...
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