Overview
- Gives a historical introduction to robotic rovers for planetary exploration
- Depicts rover development and all aspects relevant for designing them
- Provides a case study based on the ExoMars rover
- Highlighting NASA’s ‘follow the water’ strategy
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Keywords
- ExoMars Rover
- MAX-C Sample Caching Rover
- Mars Exploration Rover MER
- Multi-Rover Integrated Science Understanding System MISUS
- Rover Autonomy
- Rover Avionics
- Rover Thermal Control
- Rover Vision
- Self-localisation and Mapping SLAM
About this book
The book opens with an introduction to the use of robotic rovers for planetary exploration and their relationship to other terrestrial applications, including oceanography. The terrain in particular, in planetary environment, is a major design driver for the planetary rover and therefore a review of each planet and small bodies of the solar system and their impact on rover design is provided. Mars is the best known example for the NASA ‘follow the water’ strategy in astrobiology research and is the most likely planet to be explored in the near term. Planetary missions are designed with a different engineering philosophy than Earth-orbiting missions. There are great uncertainties about the operational environment, new scientific instruments, and the requirement for new spacecraft and robotic technologies to make them economically feasible. These include rover design, locomotion, autonomous navigation, rover avionics, mission communications’ architecture and power generation and thermalcontrol. The authors conclude by speculating on the need for the manned astrobiological investigation of Mars in terms of near-term evolution of robotic terminology and how robotic rovers can support manned mission by relieving the astronaut/cosmonaut workload. In addition, the future of robotic astrobiology missions will be explored with the implementation of biomimetic robots which attempt to utilise biological solutions to engineering problems. Finally, Nanotechnology and its limitations in the miniaturisation of actuation systems will be covered.
Authors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Planetary Rovers
Book Subtitle: Mobile Robots in Extreme Environments
Authors: Lutz Richter
Publisher: Springer Berlin, Heidelberg
eBook Packages: Physics and Astronomy, Physics and Astronomy (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-662-58758-4Due: 11 January 2025
eBook ISBN: 978-3-662-58760-7Due: 11 January 2025
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: 450