ExoMars Rover PanCam: Autonomous & Computational Intelligence [Application Notes

Abstract

As a part of the Aurora programme for Mars exploration, funded by the United Kingdom Space Agency (UKSA) and European Space Agency (ESA), the UK contributes to the Exobiology on Mars (ExoMars) rover science and engineering programme, with a scheduled launch in 2018; Hence, our Panoramic Camera (PanCam) [9][15] research and development (R&D) is timely. PanCam consists of two stereo Wide Angle Cameras (WAC) and one High Resolution Camera (HRC). While the development is still ongoing, we used funding awarded by the University College London (UCL) Graduate School to conduct investigations in the Himalayas and at Mount Everest Base Camp (EBC), according to the ExoMars rover Reference Surface Mission (RSM). The investigations included capturing stereo and high resolution images using stereo WAC emulators and HRC emulator at altitudes 3490 m, 5150 m and above. Images from different WAC filters, and color images from HRC were acquired at various Pan and Tilt Unit (PTU) mast positions. Our investigation results show significant reduction in data volume with minimum loss in image quality. Furthermore, we introduce a novel autonomous and computational intelligent system called Mission-Specific Data Processor (MSDP) for the rover. It includes Pan-Cam, Visual Data Fusion (VDF), Learning-enabled Object Detection (LOD), Self-Learning Agent (SLA) [22], and Environment Model Library (EML) as part of the rover's computational intelligence [7].