Lunar soil strength estimation based on Chang’E-3 images

Chang'E-3 (CE-3) was the third mission by China to explore the Moon which had landed two spacecraft, the CE-3 lander and Yutu rover on the lunar surface in late 2013. The paper presents analytical results of high-resolution terrain data taken by CE-3’s onboard cameras. The image data processing aims to extract sinkage profiles of the wheel tracks during the rover traverse. Further analysis leads to derivation or estimation of lunar soil physical properties (in terms of strength and stiffness) based on the wheel sinkage, despite the fact Yutu does not possess in situ soil measurement instruments. Our findings indicate that the lunar soil at the CE-3 landing site has similar stiffness to what is measured at the Luna 17 landing site but has much less strength compared to the Apollo 15 landing site.</p

Adaptive and intelligent navigation of autonomous planetary rovers - A survey

The application of robotics and autonomous systems in space has increased dramatically. The ongoing Mars rover mission involving the Curiosity rover, along with the success of its predecessors, is a key milestone that showcases the existing capabilities of robotic technology. Nevertheless, there has still been a heavy reliance on human tele-operators to drive these systems. Reducing the reliance on human experts for navigational tasks on Mars remains a major challenge due to the harsh and complex nature of the Martian terrains. The development of a truly autonomous rover system with the capability to be effectively navigated in such environments requires intelligent and adaptive methods fitting for a system with limited resources. This paper surveys a representative selection of work applicable to autonomous planetary rover navigation, discussing some ongoing challenges and promising future research directions from the perspectives of the authors

Rock segmentation in the navigation vision of the planetary rovers

Visual navigation is an essential part of planetary rover autonomy. Rock segmentation emerged as an important interdisciplinary topic among image processing, robotics, and mathematical modeling. Rock segmentation is a challenging topic for rover autonomy because of the high computational consumption, real-time requirement, and annotation difficulty. This research proposes a rock segmentation framework and a rock segmentation network (NI-U-Net++) to aid with the visual navigation of rovers. The framework consists of two stages: the pre-training process and the transfer-training process. The pre-training process applies the synthetic algorithm to generate the synthetic images; then, it uses the generated images to pre-train NI-U-Net++. The synthetic algorithm increases the size of the image dataset and provides pixel-level masks—both of which are challenges with machine learning tasks. The pre-training process accomplishes the state-of-the-art compared with the related studies, which achieved an accuracy, intersection over union (IoU), Dice score, and root mean squared error (RMSE) of 99.41%, 0.8991, 0.9459, and 0.0775, respectively. The transfer-training process fine-tunes the pre-trained NI-U-Net++ using the real-life images, which achieved an accuracy, IoU, Dice score, and RMSE of 99.58%, 0.7476, 0.8556, and 0.0557, respectively. Finally, the transfer-trained NI-U-Net++ is integrated into a planetary rover navigation vision and achieves a real-time performance of 32.57 frames per second (or the inference time is 0.0307 s per frame). The framework only manually annotates about 8% (183 images) of the 2250 images in the navigation vision, which is a labor-saving solution for rock segmentation tasks. The proposed rock segmentation framework and NI-U-Net++ improve the performance of the state-of-the-art models. The synthetic algorithm improves the process of creating valid data for the challenge of rock segmentation. All source codes, datasets, and trained models of this research are openly available in Cranfield Online Research Data (CORD)