Reconfigurable robots for all terrain exploration

While significant recent progress has been made in development of mobile robots for planetary surface exploration, there remain major challenges. These include increased autonomy of operation, traverse of challenging terrain, and fault-tolerance under long, unattended periods of use. We have begun work which addresses some of these issues, with an initial focus on problems of “high risk access, ” that is, autonomous roving over highly variable, rough terrain. This is a dual problem of sensing those conditions which require rover adaptation, and controlling the rover actions so as to implement this adaptation in a well understood way (relative to metrics of rover stability, traction, power utilization, etc.). Our work progresses along several related technical lines: 1) development a fused state estimator which robustly integrates internal rover state and externally sensed environmental information to provide accurate “configuration ” information; 2) kinematic and dynamical stability analysis of such configurations so as to determine “predicts ” for a needed change of control regime (e.g., traction control, active c.g. positioning, rover shoulder stance/pose); 3) definition and implementation of a behavior-based control architecture and action-selection strategy which autonomously sequences multi-level rover controls and reconfiguration. We report on these developments, both software simulations and hardware experimentation. Experiments include reconfigurable control of JPL's Sample Return Rover geometry and motion during its autonomous traverse over simulated Mars terrain