Targeted driving using visual tracking on Mars: From research to flight

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents the development, validation, and deployment of the visual target tracking capability onto the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. Visual target tracking enables targeted driving, in which the rover approaches a designated target in a closed visual feedback loop, increasing the target position accuracy by an order of magnitude and resulting in fewer ground‐in‐the‐loop cycles. As a result of an extensive validation, we developed a reliable normalized cross‐correlation visual tracker. To enable tracking with the limited computational resources of a planetary rover, the tracker uses the vehicle motion estimation to scale and roll the template image, compensating for large image changes between rover steps. The validation showed that a designated target can be reliably tracked within several pixels or a few centimeters of accuracy over a 10‐m traverse using a rover step size of 10% of the target distance in any direction. It also showed that the target is not required to have conspicuous features and can be selected anywhere on natural rock surfaces excluding rock boundary and shadowed regions. The tracker was successfully executed on the Opportunity rover near Victoria Crater on four distinct runs, including a single‐sol instrument placement. We present the flight experiment data of the tracking performance and execution time. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.