AUTONOMY SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE FOR LORAX (LIFE ON ICE ROBOTIC ANTARCTIC EXPLORER)

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.658.6869; http://robotics.estec.esa.int/i-SAIRAS/isairas2005/session_08a/2_jonsson_8a.pdf

The objective of the LORAX mission is for an autonomous rover to navigate more than 100 kilometers on the Antarctic ice, while taking ice samples and analyzing them for evidence of life. The mission will provide important scientific results about life in Antarctica, while also evaluating technology for future Mars missions. The LORAX rover operations will be entirely autonomous, requiring a reliable autonomous control system that can handle environmental uncertainties and changes in operations goals. In this paper, we describe a new autonomous rover control architecture, which was developed for LORAX as part of a mission and vehicle design study. The key notions in the architecture are the use of a flexible plan representation and continuous replanning to handle environmental uncertainty. The autonomy software will also be used early in the mission design process, to evaluate choices such as battery capacity, by examining expected outcomes of operations in varying conditions. 1.