This paper presents a survey of possible applications of bionic engineering in space robotics. Key areas with promising uses are: ? Manipulation tasks in on-orbit space robotics, i.e. for gripping and handling objects...
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This paper presents a survey of possible applications of bionic engineering in space robotics. Key areas with promising uses are: ? Manipulation tasks in on-orbit space robotics, i.e. for gripping and handling objects such as for on-orbit servicing;for such applications, anthropomorphic end effectors have been suggested and prototyped by several organisations ? Manipulation in planetary robotics: this is important for future tasks such as dexterous activities related to handling and processing of surface materials(rocks, boulders, soils) as needed for sampling, in situ analysis, or resource extraction ? planetary mobility: here, bionic engineering already for quite some time has been providing concepts and ideas for mobility systems in terms of legged mobility but also for suspensions and elements of tractional elements(surfaces and shapes of wheels or tracks to enhance mobility performance or to reduce drag forces) ? Sampling systems in planetary robotics: bionic engineering already has inspired concepts for novel drills for planetary sampling that have been successfully prototyped and tested. The expectation is that bionic engineering will improve space robotics systems solutions in several ways such as: improving efficiency in terms of energy usage(as energy is usually severely restricted in space missions), allowing more dexterous operations to be considered in space robotics(also in "unstructured" environments such as on planetary surfaces), and enabling the concept of robotic "swarms" along with swarm intelligence and swarm behaviour found in nature. In this paper, various selected examples of bio-inspired concepts in space robotics will be presented, along with results from prototype testing. Moreover, a discussion is presented on the expected merits of bionic engineering solutions for space robotics, from a space engineering perspective.
Identifying wheel sinkage for planetary exploration rovers can give a critical insight about the terrain traversability and in particular the characteristics of deformable soils that the rover travels on. This paper p...
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Identifying wheel sinkage for planetary exploration rovers can give a critical insight about the terrain traversability and in particular the characteristics of deformable soils that the rover travels on. This paper presents a monocular vision based approach that can detect and estimate the sinkage of a hybrid legged wheel in real time and robustly, with little sensitivity to changing operational conditions. The proposed method involves color-space segmentation that identifies the leg contour and consequently depth of wheel sinkage into the regolith. In addition, it enables dynamic analysis of the sinkage, hence making detection of non-geometric hazards possible while the rover moves. Extensive field trials have been conducted on natural deformable terrain. The experimental results demonstrate that the average discrepancy against annotated images is less than 1%. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Manipulation systems for planetary exploration operate under severe restrictions. They need to integrate vision and manipulation to achieve the reliability, safety, and predictability required of expensive systems ope...
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Manipulation systems for planetary exploration operate under severe restrictions. They need to integrate vision and manipulation to achieve the reliability, safety, and predictability required of expensive systems operating on remote planets. They also must operate on very modest hardware that is shared with many other systems, and must operate without human intervention. Typically such systems employ calibrated stereo cameras and calibrated manipulators to achieve precision of the order of one centimeter with respect to instrument placement activities. This paper presents three complementary approaches to vision guided manipulation designed to robustly achieve high precision in manipulation. These approaches are described and compared, both in simulation and on hardware. In situ estimation and adaptation of the manipulator and/or camera models in these methods account for changes in the system configuration, thus ensuring consistent precision for the life of the mission. All the three methods provide several-fold increases in accuracy of manipulator positioning over the standard flight approach. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Satellite altimetry and ice-penetrating radar have shown the existence of active subglacial lakes in Antarctica which may have a significant impact on the Southern Ocean and the dynamics of the overlying ice sheet. Un...
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Satellite altimetry and ice-penetrating radar have shown the existence of active subglacial lakes in Antarctica which may have a significant impact on the Southern Ocean and the dynamics of the overlying ice sheet. Understanding how subglacial floods affect ice dynamics is imperative to predicting the effect of ice sheets on rising sea levels, but it is not clearly understood. Furthermore, these encapsulated lakes contain uncharacterised biological ecosystems and serve as analogue environments for future extraterrestrial exploration. To investigate these subglacial environments, the authors developed the Micro Subglacial Lake Exploration Device (MSLED), a unique highly-miniaturised remotely operated vehicle. Equipped with a high-resolution imaging system, as well as conductivity, temperature and depth sensors for in situ measurements, the MSLED is capable of determining geological, hydrological and biological characteristics of subglacial lakes. It was successfully deployed in Antarctica during the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 Antarctic summer seasons in collaboration with the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) expedition to Subglacial Lake Whillans (SLW), contributing to the discovery of microbial ecosystems within these environments. The present paper outlines the scientific background behind the mission, the design and implementation of the MSLED, as well as the results of tests and initial deployments in Antarctica.
Autonomous science augments the capabilities of planetary rovers by shifting the identification and selection of science targets from remote operators to the rover itself. This shift frees the rover from wasteful idle...
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Autonomous science augments the capabilities of planetary rovers by shifting the identification and selection of science targets from remote operators to the rover itself. This shift frees the rover from wasteful idle time and allows for more selective data collection. This paper presents an approach to autonomous science that is comprised of three components: a Bayesian network that uses image data to identify features;an evaluation algorithm that selects the best features;and, a path-planning algorithm that guides the rover to the most scientifically valuable features. Within this framework, the effectiveness of pairing a larger prime rover with a smaller scout rover to improve autonomous science is investigated. Laboratory-based experiments were used to validate the effectiveness of the Bayesian network for feature identification and the scoring algorithm that has been developed for feature evaluation. Simulations were used to compare the traditional use of a solo prime rover to that of also employing a scout. The results presented here indicate that the inclusion of a scout rover can allow the prime rover to avoid pitfalls or routes with low scientific value.
The high cost of planetary rover missions limits risk-taking and therefore restricts scientific exploration. Also, limited autonomy requires time-consuming manual commands that must be issued to the rover from a great...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781424497898
The high cost of planetary rover missions limits risk-taking and therefore restricts scientific exploration. Also, limited autonomy requires time-consuming manual commands that must be issued to the rover from a great distance. This paper explores the combination of vision-based geological information inferred from a Bayesian Network (BN) with the guidance system of a micro-rover scout. Simulation is used to study the abilities of the developed algorithm.
This article has described in detail the Mars exploration rover's instrument positioning system and the use of this subsystem to carryout in situ operations of the Martian surface and subsurface. All told, the ins...
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This article has described in detail the Mars exploration rover's instrument positioning system and the use of this subsystem to carryout in situ operations of the Martian surface and subsurface. All told, the instrument deployment device (IDD) has served as an exceptional robotic mechanism for performing robust and reliable in situ science. The ability to carry out high precision mobile manipulation functions provided by the rover and the IDD has been critical to gaining a fundamental understanding of the water processes at work at both the Spirit and Opportunity landing sites. As such, the MER's IPS has paved the way for the use of future robotic devices that advance NASA's capabilities in autonomous manipulation, sample acquisition, and in situ science investigations
Many automated design approaches require an objective function to determine the quality of a given design. Often, this function is a complex relationship between many parameters that are subjective, and their relation...
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Many automated design approaches require an objective function to determine the quality of a given design. Often, this function is a complex relationship between many parameters that are subjective, and their relationships are difficult to quantify. This article presents a neural network based method to solve the inverse problem of determining the designer's preferences. In the forward problem, the designer would define relative preferences and the relationship between performance attributes for a given design task. The quality of a design could then be evaluated based on these preferences. The inverse problem seeks to quantify the designer's preferences and the relationships between those preferences based on evaluations of a few candidate designs. Generally, a human designer might propose candidate designs, the designer would then rank or rate the quality of the candidate designs, and then the candidate designs are used to solve the inverse problem by training a neural network fitness function. This fitness function can then be used to evaluate and create new designs that the human designer might not conceive. This article demonstrates the approach through the design of modular robots for planetary exploration.
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