Improved target handoff for single cycle instrument placement

Single cycle instrument placement (SCIP) could dramatically increase the speed of various planetary rover operations. JPL is validating SCIP for use on its upcoming Mars Science Laboratory mission. Two major sources of error in the implementation submitted for validation were imprecision in selecting a distant target and error introduced while handing the target off to the rover's hazard cameras (hazcams). We have added the capability to designate a target using high resolution cameras (pancams) and then, later in the traverse, hand off to medium resolution cameras (navcams) with little error. We have implemented several options for handoff from navcams to hazcams. We have evaluated their performance on several test cases. Two methods produced average handoff error of 1 pixel when successful, but these only worked in half of the tests. Two other methods reliably produced about 10 pixels of error. None reliably reached the goal of 1 cm (about 4 pixel) handoff accuracy