Odometry for a Planetary Exploration Rover

Abstract: IARES is a highly flexible planetary exploration demonstration rover developed by CNES (the French National Center for Space Studies) mainly for autonomous navigation and locomotion studies. It has 19 degrees of freedom, including six active, steerable wheels. The rover uses a software for autonomous navigation, including stereo camera perception, path planning and motion control. It is complemented by a visual simulator that can substitute the rover for practical purposes. The goal of this MSc thesis, carried out during the second semester 2006 at CNES in Toulouse, has been to make out the most of the localization capabilities of this rover using a recently implemented method : odometry. A previous study had been carried out at ONERA in Toulouse and the main goal of this thesis was to implement this new method into the environment used for the CNES rover and to test the performances of this method thanks to the simulator. All this work might be even tested on board at the very end of the internship. Given the hardware platform and the software environment, this new localization method had primarily to be studied from a theoretical point of view before being integrated into the CNES environment. The study was conducted on a Linux platform and code has been developed in C for the simulator whereas Scilab has been used for the validation tests.