Tele-Operated Lunar Rover Navigation Using Lidar

Abstract

Near real-time tele-operated driving on the lunar surface remains constrained by bandwidth and signal latency de-spite the Moon’s relative proximity. As part of our work within NASA’s Human-Robotic Sys-tems Project (HRS), we have developed a stand-alone modular LIDAR based safeguarded tele-operation system of hardware, middleware, navigation software and user interface. The system has been installed and tested on two distinct NASA rovers–JSC’s Centaur2 lunar rover pro-totype and ARC’s KRex research rover–and tested over several kilometers of tele-operated driving at average sus-tained speeds of 0.15- 0.25 m/s around rocks, slopes and simulated lunar craters using a deliberately constrained telemetry link. The navigation system builds onboard terrain and hazard maps, returning highest priority sections to the off-board operator as permitted by bandwidth availability. It also analyzes hazard maps onboard and can stop the vehicle prior to contacting hazards. It is robust to severe pose errors and uses a novel scan alignment algorithm to com-pensate for attitude and elevation errors. Key words: navigation; lunar tele-operation, Centaur2, hazard detection, RAPID, NASA telemetry standard, point cloud alignment, LIDAR, roughness estimation.