<title>Fast, cheap, and easy system for outside vision on Mars</title>

Abstract

In the design and construction of mobile robots, vision has always been one of the most potentially useful sensory systems. In practice however, it has also become the most difficult to successfully implement. At the MIT Mobile Robotics (Mobot) Lab we have designed a small, light, cheap, and low power Mobot Vision System that can be used to guide a mobile robot in a constrained environment. The target environment is the surface of Mars, although we believe the system should be applicable to other conditions as well. It is our belief that the constraints of the Martian environment will allow the implementation of a system that provides vision based guidance to a small mobile rover. The purpose of this vision system is to process realtime visual input and provide as output information about the relative location of safe and unsafe areas for the robot to go. For the first part of the project, which is nearly complete, we have built a small self contained vision system. As to the second half of the project, it is our hypothesis that a simple vision algorithm does not require huge amounts of computation and that goals such as constructing a complete three dimensional map of the environment are difficult, wasteful, and possibly unreachable.