The ability of a small rover to operate semi-autonomously in a hazardous planetary environment was recently demonstrated by the Sojourner mission to Mars in July of 1997. Sojourner stayed within a 50 meter radius of the Pathfinder Lander. Current NASA plans call for extended year-long, multi-kilometer treks for the 2003 and 2005 missions. A greater deal of rover autonomy is required for such missions. We have developed a hybrid wavelet/neural network based system, called BISMARC (biologically inspired system for map-based autonomous rover control), that is capable of such autonomy. Simulations reported at this meeting last year demonstrated that the system is capable of control for multiple rovers involved in a multiple cache recovery scenario. This robust behavior was obtained through the use of a free-flow hierarchy as an action selection mechanism. This paper extends BISMARC to include fault tolerance in the sensing and mechanical rover subsystems. The results of simulation studies in a Mars environment are also reported.
Fault tolerant action selection for planetary rover control
1998
7 Seiten, 12 Quellen
Conference paper
English
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