Tetsuo YOSHIMITSU

In recent years, rover missions for exploring lunar or planetary surface has been attracting much attention over the world, culminating the success of the Sojourner rover which explored the Martian surface in 1997.<BR>This paper proposes a new path planning method for navigation of planetary rovers, the surface environment of which is a natural terrain and described by a digital elevation map (DEM) . Given a DEM, a path from a start point to a goal is calculated based on the simple rover model which consists of three parameters. An obstacle map and a new concept of an extended elevation map defined in three dimensional space are introduced which provides the capability to use the DEM height information in three dimensional configuration space. With this extended elevation map, path planning is conducted by solving an optimization problem. Numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission Radiometer) on EOS AM-1 satellite scheduled to be launched in 1998 includes three telescopes (VNIR : Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer, SWIR : Short Wave Infrared Radiometer, TIR : Thermal Infrared Radiometer) sensitive to different wavelengths. As the telescopes are capable of changing sight directions, some inter-telescope registration technique among images with different spectral characteristics will be necessary. In this study, we propose a new registration technique using image matching to deal with these problems and show experimental results of subpixel accuracy for simulated ASTER images.