Reactive navigation through rough terrain: experimental results

Abstract

This paper describes a series of experiments that were performed on the Rocky III robot. 1 Rocky III is a small autonomous rover capable of navigating through rough outdoor terrain to a predesignated area, searching that area for soft soil, acquiring a soil sample, and depositing the sample in a container at its home base. The robot is programmed according to a reactive behaviorcontrol paradigm using the ALFA programming language. This style of programming produces robust autonomous performance while requiring significantly less computational resources than more traditional mobile robot control systems. The code for Rocky III runs on an 8-bit processor and uses about 10k of memory. Introduction The research described in this paper is motivated by NASA's planetary rover program. A planetary rover would be used on missions to deploy instruments and collect samples outside of the immediate area surrounding a lander. As science instruments get smaller and more sensitive, the size and s...