Robot Navigation for the Exploration of Lunar and Planetary Surfaces

Overview

There has been a recent, worldwide interest in exploring the solar system and beyond, but progress has been held back by the slow rate of missions and the outdated technology used in land rovers. Missions on the moon or Mars have involved a single large robot with the purpose of investigating many different properties. However, by using multiple smaller, less complex robots that specialise in navigating and finding only necessary data, such as water levels in soil or changes in the atmosphere, space exploration can progress faster. This system requires robots that can autonomously navigate around rough and jagged surfaces in between way points set by human operators on Earth. A new algorithm for robot navigation was developed using Java that utilises the most efficient parts of a greedy maze router algorithm, a greedy line probe algorithm, and simulated annealing. A user interface was implemented for visualisation, and the new hybrid algorithm was tested against the greedy maze router to compare the number of steps taken between start and end points with a range of numbers and sizes of obstacles. From the results of the simulations, it was determined that the new algorithm performs significantly better than the greedy maze router in terrain with obstacles of larger sizes and quantities. The hybrid navigation algorithm was tested on a prototype robot that was implemented on a Roomba platform and controlled by a Raspberry Pi.

Competition history

• AJAS 2019 Category not listed

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