After Mars Pathfinder’s success, a demand for new mobile robots for planetary exploration arose. These robots must be able to autonomously traverse long distances over rough, unknown terrain, under severe resource constraints. We present the “RoverBug” algorithm, which is complete, correct, requires minimal memory, and uses only on-board sensors, which are guided by the algorithm to sense only ...

This paper describes marimunl likelihood estirncr-tion techniques for performirlg rover localizatio?t in natural terrain by matching range ntaps. An OCCUpancy map of the local terrain isgertef'ated usirigstcreo visiou. The positioa of the rover rvith respect to a previously generated occupancy map M then computed by comparing the maps using a probabdistic formulation of [[ausdoz-ff matching iec...

The paper argues that a promising way to improve the success rate of preference-based anaphora resolution algorithms is the use of machine learning. The paper outlines MARS-a program for automatic resolution of pronominal anaphors and describes an experiment which we have conducted to optimise the success rate of MARS with the help of a genetic algorithm. After the optimisation we noted an impr...

the date of receipt and acceptance should be inserted later] Summary. In this paper we combine an earlier method developed with K. Jetter on general cardinal interpolation with constructions of compactly supported solutions for cardinal interpolation to gain compactly supported fundamental solutions for the general interpolation problem. The general interpolation problem admits the interpolatio...

Safeguarding is a crucial need for manipulator operations on planetary rovers. At the same time, the computing environment on a Mars rover is extremely limited, which necessitates a highly efficient collision checking algorithm. We present such an algorithm that uses the Oriented Bounding Box (OBB) and a new primitive called the Oriented Bounding Prism (OBP) to detect potential selfcollisions a...

Introduction: The Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP) returned over 16,000 high-quality images from the surface of Mars in 1997. The Surface Stereo Imager (SSI), a near duplicate of IMP on the Mars Polar Lander, will acquire images near the South Pole of Mars beginning December 3, 1999. Most scientific analyses of these datasets require some level of calibration , either into radiance units, or in...