Performance Evaluation of Handoff for Instrument Placement

[Abstract] Single Cycle Instrument Placement (SCIP), the ability to autonomously approach rocks and place contact instruments within 1cm of selected features, has been identified as a high priority for increasing the efficiency and science return for planetary rover surface operations. Because of imprecise localization, it is necessary for a rover to visually keep track of targets, using images from onboard stereo cameras, as the rover navigates to them. “Handoff” is the problem of matching a tracked point in one camera to the corresponding point in another camera pair. Handoff facilitates visual tracking of a point using multiple camera pairs, allowing at any time the choice of camera pair with the best view of the portion of the scene that is of interest. A significant fraction of the tracking error budget is due to handoff. In this paper, we review several methods for solving what we refer to as the handoff problem and evaluate their performance in the context of integrated planetary rover test beds analogous to the MER Spirit and Opportunity vehicles.