Related papers: Modeling of Terrain Deformation by a Grouser Wheel…
High-fidelity simulators for the lunar surface provide a digital environment for extensive testing of rover operations and mission planning. However, current simulators focus on either visual realism or physical accuracy, which limits their…
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…
While simulation is vital for optimizing robotic systems, the cost of modeling deformable terrain has long limited its use in full-vehicle studies of off-road autonomous mobility. For example, Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations are…
Planetary rovers operating in extraterrestrial environments often encounter significant mobility challenges due to varying terrain features such as gradients and granularity. While recent works in multimodal wheel design have explored…
Wheeled rovers have been the primary choice for lunar exploration due to their speed and efficiency. However, deeper areas, such as lunar caves and craters, require the mobility of legged robots. To do so, appropriate end effectors must be…
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…
Robot-aided exploration of planetary surfaces is essential for understanding geologic processes, yet many scientifically valuable regions, such as Martian dunes and lunar craters, remain hazardous due to loose, deformable regolith. We…
This contribution reports on a software framework that uses physically-based rendering to simulate camera operation in lunar conditions. The focus is on generating synthetic images qualitatively similar to those produced by an actual camera…
Understanding the wheel-terrain interaction is of great importance to improve the maneuverability and traversability of the rovers. A well-developed sensing device carried by the rover would greatly facilitate the complex risk-reducing…
Recently, there has been a surge of international interest in extraterrestrial exploration targeting the Moon, Mars, the moons of Mars, and various asteroids. This contribution discusses how current state-of-the-art Earth-based testing for…
Autonomous space rovers face significant challenges when navigating deformable and heterogeneous terrains due to variability in soil properties, which can lead to severe wheel slip, compromising navigation efficiency and increasing the risk…
Autonomous precision navigation to land onto the Moon relies on vision sensors. Computer vision algorithms are designed, trained and tested using synthetic simulations. High quality terrain models have been produced by Moon orbiters…
This thesis presents a unified modeling and simulation framework for analyzing sidewinding and tumbling locomotion of the COBRA snake robot across rigid, compliant, and granular terrains. A contact-implicit formulation is used to model…
Legged locomotion on deformable terrain is a challenging and open robo-physics problem since the uncertainty in terrain dynamics introduced by ground deformation complicates the dynamical modelling and control methods. Moreover, learning…
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…
Establishing lunar infrastructure is paramount to long-term habitation on the Moon. To meet the demand for future lunar infrastructure development, we present CraterGrader, a novel system for autonomous robotic earthmoving tasks within…
This paper proposes a real-time physically-based method for simulating vehicle deformation. Our system synthesizes vehicle deformation characteristics by considering a low-dimensional coupled vehicle body technique. We simulate the motion…
The wheel-soil interaction has great impact on the dynamics of off-road vehicles in terramechanics applications. The Soil Contact Model (SCM), which anchors an empirical method to characterize the frictional contact between a wheel and…
In this work, we propose the use of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) for rover localization on Mars. Precise pose estimation is an important task for mobile robots exploring planetary surfaces, as they operate in GPS-denied environments.…
Traversability assessment of deformable terrain is vital for safe rover navigation on planetary surfaces. Machine learning (ML) is a powerful tool for traversability prediction but faces predictive uncertainty. This uncertainty leads to…