PRoViScout: a planetary scouting rover demonstrator

Abstract

Mobile systems exploring Planetary surfaces in future will require more autonomy than today. The EU FP7-SPACE Project ProViScout (2010-2012) establishes the building blocks of such autonomous exploration systems in terms of robotics vision by a decision-based combination of navigation and scientific target selection, and integrates them into a framework ready for and exposed to field demonstration. The PRoViScout on-board system consists of mission management components such as an Executive, a Mars Mission On-Board Planner and Scheduler, a Science Assessment Module, and Navigation & Vision Processing modules. The platform hardware consists of the rover with the sensors and pointing devices. We report on the major building blocks and their functions & interfaces, emphasizing on the computer vision parts such as image acquisition (using a novel zoomed 3D-Time-of-Flight & RGB camera), mapping from 3D-TOF data, panoramic image & stereo reconstruction, hazard and slope maps, visual odometry and the recognition of potential scientifically interesting targets

Self‐reliant rovers for increased mission productivity

“…There have been several integrated rover systems with similar objectives to our work including PRoViScout (Paar et al, 2012), Zoe (Wettergreen et al, 2014), and OASIS (Castano et al, 2007). The PRoViScout project has similar objectives to our work (Paar et al, 2012). These systems include autonomous science capabilities to enable onboard identification of science targets.…”