Planetary rover localization within orbital maps

Author

Nefian, A.V. ; Bouyssounouse, X. ; Edwards, L. ; Kim, T. ; Hand, E. ; Rhizor, J. ; Deans, M. ; Bebis, G. ; Fong, T.

Author_Institution

NASA Ames Res. Center, Carnegie Mellon Univ., Reno, NV, USA

fYear

2014

fDate

27-30 Oct. 2014

Firstpage

1628

Lastpage

1632

Abstract

This paper introduces an advanced rover localization system suitable for autonomous planetary exploration in the absence of Global Positioning System (GPS) infrastructure. Given an existing terrain map (image and elevation) obtained from satellite imagery and the images provided by the rover stereo camera system, the proposed method determines the best rover location through visual odometry, 3D terrain and horizon matching. The system is tested on data retrieved from a 3 km traverse of the Basalt Hills quarry in California where the GPS track is used as ground truth. Experimental results show the system presented here reduces by over 60% the localization error obtained by wheel odometry.

Keywords

Global Positioning System; planetary rovers; 3D terrain; Basalt hills quarry; GPS track; advanced rover localization system; autonomous planetary exploration; horizon matching; orbital maps; planetary rover localization; rover stereo camera system; satellite imagery; terrain map; visual odometry; wheel odometry; Cameras; Estimation; Global Positioning System; Robots; Three-dimensional displays; Visualization; Wheels; autonomous navigation; horizon matching; localization; visual odometry;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Image Processing (ICIP), 2014 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Paris

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICIP.2014.7025326

Filename

7025326