Enabling Commercial Autonomous Space Robotic Explorers

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Enabling Commercial Autonomous Space Robotic Explorers

Liu, Shaoshan

This chapter explores a very interesting topic, building commercial autonomous space robotic explorers. It explains the autonomous driving technologies, including localization, perception, planning, and control, required to enable a commercial space exploration robot, as well as how to integrate these technologies into a working system. The chapter introduces the environments of Mars and also explores the challenges of enabling autonomous robotic explorers on Mars. It examines the autonomous driving technologies and challenges for Mars explorers with a focus on perception and decision. This environment is particularly challenging for localization and path planning of the robot explorers. In order to navigate from one point to another, the explorer generates a series of direction‐oriented waypoints, leading up to the goal destination. Each waypoint is reached by repeating the process of terrain assessment and path selection. The chapter also presents an urgent challenge for space exploration mission, namely, computing power.