Stereo vision and rover navigation software for planetary exploration

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Abstract
NASA' s Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions will land twin rovers on the surface of Mars in 2004. These rovers will have the ability to navigate safely through un- known and potentially hazardous terrain, using autonomous passive stereo vision to detect potential terrain hazards before driving into them. Unfortunately, the computational power of currently available radiation hardened processors limits the amount of distance (and therefore science) that can be safely achieved by any rover in a given time frame. We present overviews of our current rover vision and naviga- tion systems, to provide context for the types of computation that are required to navigate safely. We also present baseline timing results that represent a lower bound in achievable per- formance (useful for systems engineering studies of future missions), and describe ways to improve that performance using commercial grade (as opposed to radiation hardened) processors. In particular, we document speedups to our stereo vision system that were achieved using the vectorized oper- ations provided by Pentium MMX technology. Timing data were derived from implementations on several platforms: a prototype Mars rover with flight-lik e electronics (the Athena Software Development Model (SDM) rover), a RAD6000 computing platform (as will be used in the 2003 MER mis- sions), and research platforms with commercial Pentium III and Sparc processors. Finally, we summarize the radiation effects analysis that sug- gests that commercial grade processors are likely to be ad- equate for Mars surface missions, and discuss the level of speedup that may accrue from using these instead of radia- tion hardened parts.

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