Autonomous Rover Navigation on Unknown Terrains Functions and Integration.

Autonomous long range navigation in partially known planetary-like terrain is an open challenge for robotics. Navigating several hundreds of meters without any human intervention requires the robot to be able to build various representations of its environment, to plan and execute trajectories according to the kind of terrain traversed, to localize itself as it moves, and to schedule, start, control and interrupt these various activities. In this paper, we briefly describe some functionalities that are currently running on board the Marsokhod model robot Lama at LAAS/CNRS. We then focus on the necessity to integrate various instances of the perception and decision functionalities, and on the difficulties raised by this integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]