Mobile robotic surveying performance for planetary surface site characterization

Abstract

Robotic systems will perform mobile surveys for scientific and engineering purposes as part of future missions on lunar and planetary surfaces. With site characterization as a task objective various system configurations and surveying techniques are possible. This chapter describes several examples of mobile surveying approaches using local and remote sensing configurations. A geometric measure of area coverage performance is applied to each and relative performance in surveying a common area is characterized by expected performance trends. Performance metrics that solely express geometric aspects of the robotic task are limited in utility as decision aids to human mission operators. As such, the importance of enriching such metrics by incorporating additional attributes germane to surveying on planetary surfaces is highlighted. Examples of enriched metrics employed by recent NASA research work on human-supervised robotic surveying are provided. © 2009 Springer-Verlag US.