Payload support for planetary exploration―monitoring and control of a tethered micro-rover for planetary exploration

摘要

This paper provides a summary of an end-to-end control system for autonomous navigation of the Nanokhod micro-rover for planetary exploration which has been developed in the ESA project "Payload Support for Planetary Exploration" (ESA contract no. 13501/99/NL/PA). This end-to-end control system has to deal with limited knowledge about the environment as well as limited system resources and constraining operational boundary conditions, especially very large time delay in the communication between the ground segment and the space segment. To overcome these constraints the remote system has to act in a very autonomous way. A Ground Control System minimizes the computational load on the remote Lander Control System on the planet. High-level information interchange reduces the needs for communication bandwidth.