Integrated System for Sensing and Traverse of Cliff Faces

A long duration robotic presence on lunar and planetary surfaces will allow the acquisition of scientifically interesting information from a diverse set of surface and sub-surface sites. The wide range of terrain types including plains, cliffs, sand dunes, and lava tubes will require the development of robotic systems that can adapt to possibly rapidly changing terrain. These systems include single as well as teams of robots. In this paper, we describe the development of an integrated suite of autonomous, adaptive hardware/ software control methods called SMART (System for Mobility and Access to Rough Terrain) that enables mobile robots to explore potentially important science sites currently beyond the reach of conventional rover designs. SMART uses the behavior coordination mechanisms of CAMPOUT, a previously developed system for multi-agent control. For the specific application area of cliffside exploration, SMART consists of a distributed sensing system for cooperative map-making called MITSAF (Model-based Information Theoretic Sensing And Fusion), a mobility system for rappelling down a cliff and moving to a designated way-point, and science sample acquisition from the cliff face. We also report the results of some experimental studies on highly sloped cliff faces.