Progress towards robotic exploration of extreme terrain

A high degree of mobility, reliability, and efficiency are needed for autonomous exploration of extreme terrain. These requirements have guided the development of the Ambler, a six-legged robot designed for planetary exploration. To address issues of efficiency and mobility, the Ambler is configured with a stacked arrangement of orthogonal legs and exhibits a unique circulating gait, where trailing legs recover directly from rear to front. The Ambler is designed to stably traverse a 30 degree slope while crossing meter sized features. The same three principles have provided many constraints on the design of a software system that autonomously navigates the Ambler through natural terrain using 3-D perception and a combined deliberative/reactive architecture. The software system has required research advances in real-time control, perception of rugged terrain, motion planning, task-level control, and system integration. This paper presents many of the factors that influenced the design of the Ambler and its software system. In particular, important assumptions regarding the mechanism, perception, planning, and control are presented and evaluated in light of experimental and theoretical research of this project.