CESER research group plans to put rovers in the metaphorical driver’s seat by integrating their onboard systems with advanced image processing capabilities. Our principal tool for these investigations is the 30 kg Kapvik micro rover designed from an earlier concept for a Mars micro rover. There are several novel features in its design. It implements an instrumented rocker-bogie chassis permitting online traction analysis during the traverse. Furthermore, it adopts an integrated manipulator-scoop/camera mast system. FPGAs are the primary computing platform to implement stereovision and LIDAR processing with cubature Kalman filter and FastSLAM algorithms for autonomous navigation.
