Related papers: An Instrumented Wheel-On-Limb System of Planetary …
A thorough analysis of wheel-terrain interaction is critical to ensure the safe and efficient operation of space rovers on extraterrestrial surfaces like the Moon or Mars. This paper presents an approach for developing and experimentally…
Robot mobility is critical for mission success, especially in soft or deformable terrains, where the complex wheel-soil interaction mechanics often leads to excessive wheel slip and sinkage, causing the eventual mission failure. To improve…
Slip detection is of fundamental importance for the safety and efficiency of rovers driving on the surface of extraterrestrial bodies. Current planetary rover slip detection systems rely on visual perception on the assumption that…
Off-road navigation on vertically challenging terrain, involving steep slopes and rugged boulders, presents significant challenges for wheeled robots both at the planning level to achieve smooth collision-free trajectories and at the…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
Most autonomous navigation systems assume wheeled robots are rigid bodies and their 2D planar workspaces can be divided into free spaces and obstacles. However, recent wheeled mobility research, showing that wheeled platforms have the…
We present an approach to enhance wheeled planetary rover dead-reckoning localization performance by leveraging the use of zero-type constraint equations in the navigation filter. Without external aiding, inertial navigation solutions…
Simulation of vehicle motion in planetary environments is challenging. This is due to the modeling of complex terrain, optical conditions, and terrain-aware vehicle dynamics. One of the critical issues of typical simulators is that they…
In this paper, we present a user-friendly planetary rover's control system for low latency surface telerobotic. Thanks to the proposed system, an operator can comfortably give commands through the control base station to a rover using…
Proprioceptive sensors on planetary rovers serve for state estimation and for understanding terrain and locomotion performance. While inertial measurement units (IMUs) are widely used to this effect, force-torque sensors are less explored…
This paper compares the performance of adaptive and robust Kalman filter algorithms in improving wheel-inertial odometry on low featured rough terrain. Approaches include classical adaptive and robust methods as well as variational methods,…
The exploration of the lunar poles and the collection of samples from the martian surface are characterized by shorter time windows demanding increased autonomy and speeds. Autonomous mobile robots must intrinsically cope with a wider range…
The increasingly complex and diverse planetary exploration environment requires more adaptable and flexible rover navigation strategy. In this study, we propose a VLM-empowered multi-mode system to achieve efficient while safe autonomous…
NightOwl is a robotic platform designed exclusively for a wheeled service robot. The robot navigates autonomously in omnidirectional fashion movement and equipped with LIDAR to sense the surrounding area. The platform itself was built using…
Robotic spacecraft have helped expand our reach for many planetary exploration missions. Most ground mobile planetary exploration robots use wheeled or modified wheeled platforms. Although extraordinarily successful at completing intended…
A reliable pose estimator robust to environmental disturbances is desirable for mobile robots. To this end, inertial measurement units (IMUs) play an important role because they can perceive the full motion state of the vehicle…
Rail and wheel interaction functionality is pivotal to the railway system safety, requiring accurate measurement systems for optimal safety monitoring operation. This paper introduces an innovative onboard measurement system for monitoring…
Legged rovers provide enhanced mobility compared to wheeled platforms, enabling navigation on steep and irregular planetary terrains. However, traditional legged locomotion might be energetically inefficient and potentially dangerous to the…
Onboard localization capabilities for planetary rovers to date have used relative navigation, by integrating combinations of wheel odometry, visual odometry, and inertial measurements during each drive to track position relative to the…
Tactile sensing in mobile robots remains under-explored, mainly due to challenges related to sensor integration and the complexities of distributed sensing. In this work, we present a tactile sensing architecture for mobile robots based on…