Developing a Framework for Reliable Autonomous Surface Mobility

The Reliable Autonomous Surface Mobility (RASM) architecture and algorithms model terrains, plan paths, and control motion to enable rovers to navigate autonomously through kilometers of barren terrain. We have developed requirements for rovers from the needs of field investigations and mission scenarios of the last decade. Thus far the RASM architecture has been ported to five rovers and tested in field sites in Hawaii, California and Canada. We report on the architectural framework, the under lying algorithms , and representative results.