AUTONOMY AND REMOTE-CONTROL EXPERIMENT FOR LUNAR ROVER MISSIONS

Teleoperation will be used for rover control during lunar missions. Ho wever the interesting places for scientific investigations are located in difficult areas: the south pole, or deep craters in which communic ations to the earth will be limited and possibly interrupted. To inves tigate the feasibility of such missions, a testbed has been built in o rder to check the feasibility of remote control of the rover in the pr esence of important time delays with low-rate communications, as well as to demonstrate the capability of autonomous motion during communica tions blackout periods. The testbed consists of a 6x6 vehicle able to move on a moon-representative terrain, either in an autonomous mode or in low-communication-rate teleoperation called TESA. This paper descr ibes the vehicle,its control and the results obtained during the tests . Copyright (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.