• Journal of Space Technology and Applications
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.213-228
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• 2023

Unmanned exploration rovers serve as tools for investigating mineral resources, mining, and carrying out various scientific on celestial bodies beyond Earth, acting on behalf of humans. Recently, not only the United States but also other countries such as Japan, India and China have been attempting to develop unmanned planetary exploration rovers for space development or have successfully operated them on other celestial bodies. This has accelerated the enthusiasm for space exploration and development. However, the development and operation of unmanned rovers for planetary exploration still entail significant costs and high risks, making it difficult for universities or companies to undertake such project independently without the guidance of financial backing from government entities. In this paper, we describe the recent development trends of micro-rovers, known as Cube Rovers, which inherit the concepts and definitions of traditional Cube Sat. We also introduce the potential and expectations of Cube Rovers through the necessity of their development and ongoing planetary exploration cases.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.630-637
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• 2019

The scientific, economical and industrial values of the Moon have been increased, as massive ice-water and rare resource were founded from the lunar exploration missions. Korea and other major space agencies in the world are competitively developing the ISRU (In Situ Resource Utilization) technology to secure future lunar resource as well as to construct the lunar base. To prepare for the lunar construction, it is essential to develop the rover based construction spatial information technology to provide a decision-making aided information during the lunar construction process. Thus, this research presented the construction spatial information technology based upon rover's camera system. Specifically, the conceptual design of rover based camera system was designed for acquisition of a rover's navigation image, and lunar terrain and construction images around the rover. The reference architecture of the rover operation system was designed for computation of the lunar construction spatial information. Also, rover's localization and terrain reconstruction methods were introduced considering the characteristics of lunar surface environments. It is necessary to test and validate the conceptual design of the construction spatial information technology. Thus, in the future study, the developed rover and rover operation system will be applied to the lunar terrestrial analogue site for further improvements.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.20 no.12
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• pp.271-279
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• 2019

In extreme environment regions, unmanned rovers equipped with various sensors and devices are being developed for long-term exploration on behalf of humans. On the other hand, due to the harsh weather conditions and rough terrain, the rover camera has limited visible distance and field of view. Therefore, the rover cameras should be located for safe navigation and efficient terrain mapping. In this regard, to minimize the cost and time to manufacture the camera system on a rover, the simulation method using the rover design is presented to optimize the camera locations on the rover efficiently. In the simulation, a simulated terrain was taken from cameras with different locations and angles. The visible distance and overlapped extent of camera images, and terrain data accuracy calculated from the simulation were compared to determine the optimal locations of the rover's cameras. The simulated results will be used to manufacture a rover and camera system. In addition, self and system calibrations will be conducted to calculate the accurate position of the camera system on the rover.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.677-692
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• 2009

In recent years, lots of studies on the planetary rover systems have been performed around space advanced agencies such as NASA, ESA, JAXA, etc. Among the various technologies for the planetary rover system, the mobility system, navigation algorithm, and scientific payload have been focused particularly. In this paper, the conceptual design for a ground-based model of planetary rover's mobility system to evaluate mobility and moving stability on ground is presented. The status of overseas research and development of the planetary rover systems is also addressed in terms of technical issues. And then, the requirements of the planetary rover's mobility system are derived by means of considering mobility and stability. The designed rover's mobility system has an active suspension with 6 legs that controls 6 joints on the each leg in order to achieve high stability and mobility. This kind of mobility system has already applied to the ATHELE of NASA for various purposes such as transportation and habitation for human lunar exploration activities in the near future (i.e., Constellation program). However, the proposed system has been designed by focusing on the small-sized unmanned explorations, which may be applied for the future Korea Lunar exploration missions. Therefore, we expect that this study will be an useful reference and experience in order to develop the planetary exploration rover system in Korea.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.176.1-176.1
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• 2012

최근 무인 항공기 발전으로 영상 촬영 및 도로 정보 획득과 같은 다양한 분야에서 이를 활용하고 있다. 특히 무인 항공기가 점점 소형화되어가고 있고, 안전하게 이동하고, 한 지점에 머무를 수 있는 기능이 개발되어 최근 ArDrone과 같은 쿼드로터가 각광을 받고 있다. 이와 같은 기술을 위치를 파악할 수 없는 외계 공간에서 활용을 한다면 인간이 지나갈 수 없는 협소한 공간 혹은 위험한 장소를 대신하여 탐색할 수 있어 위험에 처한 인명을 구하는데 큰 도움을 줄 수 있다. 하지만 외계 공간에서는 GPS와 같은 위치를 인식할 수 없어 정해진 임무를 수행하기란 매우 어려운 일이다. 본 논문에서는 최근 각광받고 있는 SLAM 기술을 사용하여 3차원 지도를 생성하고, 이를 기반으로 실시간으로 영상을 인식하여 위치를 파악한 후 외계공간에서 로버를 사용하여 자율 주행이 가능한 시스템에 대한 개념 설계 내용을 설명한다.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.259-267
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• 2020

For real-time precise positioning, N-RTK (Network Real-Time Kinematic) technology is widely used these days. However, the currently operating N-RTK system has a limitation in terms of the number of users. Therefore, if reference points generate correction messages with no limit on the number of users are developed later, it is determined that an appropriate reference point installation interval is required, so that the accuracy of the N-RTK system according to the baseline distance was analyzed. This experiment utilized receivers with varying performance that estimated the rover position, and RTKLIB, an open-source software, is used for processing data. As a result, the rover position was estimated accurately with a high rate of fixed ambiguity for all the receivers. When the reference station with a baseline length of 40 km was used, the vertical RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error) was quite similar to the short baseline case, but only half of the ambiguity fixing rate was achieved. The outlier in the estimated rover position was not observed for the longer baselines in the case of a high-end receiver. It is necessary to analyze the ambiguity fixing and the accuracy of the kinematic positioning with scientific GNSS processing software.

• Journal of the Korean GEO-environmental Society
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• v.23 no.10
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• pp.21-31
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• 2022

Prospecting ice on Moon requires drilling systems to obtain subsurface samples and measure composition of ice deposits. Landers and rovers need to be equipped with drilling equipment in order to analyze the ice and subsurface resources located at the poles of Moon. These devices must be small, lightweight, low-power, highly efficient and high-performance units in order to function properly under the extreme conditions of the lunar environment. Researchers have developed a prototype drilling apparatus that is able to operate in atmospheric and cold environments. Newly developed drilling system in Korea, which is capable of performing not only sampling but also subsurface investigation, is introduced.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.38 no.9
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• pp.19-33
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• 2022

Planarity geotechnical exploration missions were actively performed during the 1970s and there was a period of decline from the 1 990s to the 2000s because of budget. However, exploring space resources is essential to prepare for the depletion of Earth's resources in the future and explore resources abundant in space but scarce on Earth, such as rare earth and helium-3. Additionally, the development of space technology has become the driving force of future industry development. The competition among developed countries for exoplanet exploration has recently accelerated for the exploration and utilization of space resources. For these missions and resource exploration/mining, geotechnical exploration is required. There have been several missions to explore exoplanet ground, including the Moon, Mars, and asteroids. There are Apollo, LUNA, and Chang'E missions for exploration of the Moon. The Mars missions included Viking, Spirit/Opportunity, Phoenix, and Perseverance missions, and the asteroid missions included the Hayabusa missions. In this study, space planetary mineral resource exploration technologies are explained, and the future technological tasks of Korea are described.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.7
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• pp.144-152
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• 2018

Lunar exploration, which was led by the United States and the former Soviet Union, ceased in the 1970s. On the other hand, since massive lunar ice deposits and rare resources were found in 1990s, European Union, China, Japan, and India began to participate in lunar exploration to secure future lunar resource as well as to construct a lunar base. In the near future, it is expected that national space agencies and private industries will participate in the lunar exploration together. Their missions will include the exploration and sample return of lunar resources. Lunar resources have a close relationship with the lunar in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). To construct a lunar base, it is inevitable to bring huge amounts of resources from Earth. Water and oxygen, however, will need to be produced from local lunar resources and lunar terrain feature will need to be used to construct the lunar base. Therefore, in this paper, the global trends on lunar exploration and lunar construction technology are investigated and compared along with the ISRU technology to support human exploration and construct a lunar base on the Moon's surface.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.281-298
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• 2023

Continuous research efforts are being devoted to unmanned mobile platforms for lunar exploration. There is an ongoing demand for real-time information processing to accurately determine the positioning and mapping of areas of interest on the lunar surface. To apply deep learning processing and analysis techniques to practical rovers, research on software integration and optimization is imperative. In this study, a foundational investigation has been conducted on real-time analysis of virtual lunar base construction site images, aimed at automatically quantifying spatial information of key objects. This study involved transitioning from an existing region-based object recognition algorithm to a boundary box-based algorithm, thus enhancing object recognition accuracy and inference speed. To facilitate extensive data-based object matching training, the Batch Hard Triplet Mining technique was introduced, and research was conducted to optimize both training and inference processes. Furthermore, an improved software system for object recognition and identical object matching was integrated, accompanied by the development of visualization software for the automatic matching of identical objects within input images. Leveraging satellite simulative captured video data for training objects and moving object-captured video data for inference, training and inference for identical object matching were successfully executed. The outcomes of this research suggest the feasibility of implementing 3D spatial information based on continuous-capture video data of mobile platforms and utilizing it for positioning objects within regions of interest. As a result, these findings are expected to contribute to the integration of an automated on-site system for video-based construction monitoring and control of significant target objects within future lunar base construction sites.