Low Cost and Low Weight Technologies for Planetary Surface Exploration

This paper presents the results of recent efforts towards the design of low cost and low weight technologies for autonomous vehicles. The test bench for such technologies is an autonomous ground vehicle (UGV) designed and built at University of Pisa. The main issues covered are related to guidance and navigation, by using an integrated system based on odometric and inertial sensors. The problem of obstacle recognition and avoidance is addressed by online vision-based algorithms, and compared with current methods (such as SLAM), presently used for this type of application. Cooperative localization and multi-vehicle coordination are also addressed using dynamic path allocation methods applied in the past to terrestrial unmanned air vehicles coordination and cooperative control. The proposed methodologies are validated through computer simulation, as well as via limited field experiments.