An Architecture for Distributed Environment Sensing with Application to Robotic Cliff Exploration

Authors:
Vivek A. Sujan;Steven Dubowsky;Terry Huntsberger;Hrand Aghazarian;Yang Cheng;Paul Schenker
Affiliations:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. vasujan@alum.mit.edu;Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA;Mobility System Concept Development Section, Jet Propulsion Lab, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA;Mobility System Concept Development Section, Jet Propulsion Lab, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA;Mobility System Concept Development Section, Jet Propulsion Lab, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA;Mobility System Concept Development Section, Jet Propulsion Lab, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
Venue:
Autonomous Robots
Year:
2004

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Abstract

Future planetary exploration missions will use cooperative robots to explore and sample rough terrain. To succeed robots will need to cooperatively acquire and share data. Here a cooperative multi-agent sensing architecture is presented and applied to the mapping of a cliff surface. This algorithm efficiently repositions the systems' sensing agents using an information theoretic approach and fuses sensory information using physical models to yield a geometrically consistent environment map. This map is then distributed among the agents using an information based relevant data reduction scheme. Experimental results for cliff face mapping using the JPL Sample Return Rover (SRR) are presented. The method is shown to significantly improve mapping efficiency over conventional methods.