Fuzzy reactive piloting for continuous driving of long range autonomous planetary micro-rovers

Abstract

Abstract — A complete piloting control subsystem for a highly autonomous long range rover will be defined in order to identify the key control functions needed to achieve contin-uous driving. This capability can maximize range and num-ber of interesting scientific sites visited during the limited life time of a planetary rover. To achieve continuous driving, a complete set of techniques have been employed: fuzzy based control, real-time artificial intelligence reasoning, fast and ro-bust rover position estimation based on odometry and angu-lar rate sensing, efficient stereo vision elevation maps based on grids, and fast reaction and planning for obstacle detec-tion and obstacle avoidance based on a simple IF-THEN ex-pert system with fuzzy reasoning. To quickly design and im-plement these techniques, graphical programming has been used to build a fully autonomous piloting system using jus