Two years of Visual Odometry on the Mars Exploration Rovers

13 years 4 months ago

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NASA’s two Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) have successfully demonstrated a robotic Visual Odometry capability on another world for the ﬁrst time. This provides each rover with accurate knowledge of its position, which allows it to autonomously detect and compensate for any unforeseen slip encountered during a drive. It has enabled the rovers to drive safely and more eﬀectively in highly-sloped and sandy terrains, and has resulted in increased mission science return by reducing the number of days required to drive into interesting areas. The MER Visual Odometry system comprises onboard software for comparing stereo pairs taken by the pointable mast-mounted 45 degree FOV Navigation cameras (NAVCAMs). The system computes an update to the 6 Degree Of Freedom rover pose (x, y, z, roll, pitch, yaw) by tracking the motion of autonomously-selected terrain features between two pairs of 256x256 stereo images. It has demonstrated good performance with high rates of successful convergence (9...

Mark W. Maimone, Yang Cheng, Larry Matthies

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