• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.381-387
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• 2012

The planetary exploration rover executes various missions after moving to the target point in an unknown environment in the shortest distance. Such missions include the researches for geological and climatic conditions as well as the existence of water or living creatures. If there is any obstacle on the way, it is detected by such sensors as ultrasonic sensor, infrared light sensor, stereo vision, and laser ranger finder. After the obtained data is transferred to the main controller of the rover, decisions can be made to either overcome or avoid the obstacle on the way based on the operating algorithm of the rover. All the planetary exploration rovers which have been developed until now receive the information of the height or width of the obstacle from such sensors before analyzing it in order to find out whether it is possible to overcome the obstacle or not. If it is decided to be better to overcome the obstacle in terms of the operating safety and the electric consumption of the rover, it is generally made to overcome it. Therefore, for the purpose of carrying out the planetary exploration task, it is necessary to design the proper suspension system of the rover which enables it to safely overcome any obstacle on the way on the surface in any unknown environment. This study focuses on the design of the new double 4-bar linkage type of suspension system applied to the Korea Aerospace Research Institute rover (a tentatively name) that is currently in the process of development by our institute in order to develop the planetary exploration rover which absolutely requires the capacity of overcoming any obstacle. Throughout this study, the negative moment which harms the capacity of the rover for overcoming an obstacle was induced through the dynamical modeling process for the rocker-bogie applied to the Mars exploration rover of the US and the improved version of rocker-bogie as well as the suggested double 4-bar linkage type of suspension system. Also, based on the height of the obstacle, a simulation was carried out for the negative moment of the suspension system before the excellence of the suspension system suggested through the comparison of responding characteristics was proved.

• Journal of the Korean Geosynthetics Society
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.1-8
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• 2023

Space exploration is at the forefront of human scientific endeavors, and planetary exploration rovers play a critical role in studying planetary surfaces. Rover performance is especially vital for safely navigating steep terrain and delicate landscapes found on planets like Mars and the Moon. This paper offers a comprehensive overview of a landing testbed designed to simulate challenging extraterrestrial terrain and loose regolith. The paper briefly outlines lunar crater region topographical features and highlights the importance of these simulations in rover testing. It then explores previous landing testbed developments and describes the design process for a landing testbed to be installed in the dirty thermal vacuum chamber at the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology. Once realized, this proposed landing testbed will enable precise evaluations of rover mobility and exploration capabilities under lunar-like conditions, including high vacuum and extreme temperatures.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.8 no.10
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• pp.881-889
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• 2002

Mobility analysis for various mobile mechanisms including mechanisms with lack of geometric generality is performed. Joint screws are employed to find the sire of feasible joint motion space or each of independent loops of mobile mechanisms. Particularly, the concept of "representative screws" is introduced to represent the feasible motion spaces for subsets of joints belonging to either a loop or a sub-system consisting of several closed loops. Firstly. simplified joint model for each of low different typical wheels popularly employed in mobile robots is described. Then. mobility analysis fir various types of planar mobile robots and the Mars Rover mobile robot for navigation on the rocky road on Mars arc performed. It is confirmed that the obtained results in this study coincide with the previous ones which were obtained by suing imaginary Joints approach(1)pproach(1)

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.45 no.10
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• pp.836-843
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• 2017

In lunar exploration, the necessity of utilizing rover is verified by the examples of the Soviet Union and China and the similar Mars missions of the United States. In order to achieve the successful management of a lunar rover, a high precision navigation technique is required, and accordingly, high precision initial alignment is essential. Even though it is general to perform initial alignment in a steady state, a multiposition alignment technique is applied when high performance is needed. On the lunar surface, however, the performance of initial alignment decreases from that on Earth, and it cannot be improved by applying multiposition alignment method owing to certain constraints of lunar environment. In this paper, a sun sensor aided multiposition alignment technique is proposed. The measurement model for a sun vector is established, and its observability analysis is performed. The performance of the proposed algorithm is verified through computer simulations, and the results show the estimation performance is improved dramatically.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.479-486
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• 2018

In order to ensure reliable navigation performance of a lunar exploration rover, navigation algorithms using additional sensors such as inertial measurement units and cameras are essential on lunar surface in the absence of a global navigation satellite system. Unprecedentedly, Visual Odometry (VO) using a stereo camera has been successfully implemented at the US Mars rovers. In this paper, we estimate the 6-DOF pose of the lunar exploration rover from gray images of a lunar-like terrains. The proposed algorithm estimates relative pose of consecutive images by sparse image alignment based semi-direct VO. In order to overcome vulnerability to non-linearity of direct VO, we add adaptive motion prior weights calculated from a linear function of the previous pose to the optimization cost function. The proposed algorithm is verified in lunar-like terrain dataset recorded by Toronto University reflecting the characteristics of the actual lunar environment.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.373-387
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• 2023

Scientific exploration of extraterrestrial planets has gripped human imagination since the advent of space travel. Human missions to Mars could produce insight into the essential questions of how, when and where life began on Earth. Such missions would only be feasible using local space resources materials, a concept called in situ-resource utilization (ISRU). The purpose of this paper is to provide a thorough review of the currently available Mars soil simulants and to determine those with geotechnical properties most appropriate for vehicle mobility studies. Sourcing and processing are considered since full-scale studies require bulk quantities of material on the order of tens of tons. This review identifies the simulants with the highest fidelity to Mars wind drift soils. In addition, recommendation guide for mars soil simulant development made.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.1472-1488
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• 2019

Critical elements in the China's Lunar Exploration reside in that the lunar rover travels over the surrounding undetermined environment and it conducts scientific exploration under the ground control via teleoperation system. Such an interplanetary transportation mission teleoperation system belongs to the ground application system in deep space mission, which performs terrain reconstruction, visual positioning, path planning, and rover motion control by receiving telemetry data. It plays a vital role in the whole lunar exploration operation and its so-called trustworthy evidence must be assessed before and during its implementation. Taking ISO standards and China's national military standards as trustworthy evidence source, the net assessment model and net assessment method of teleoperation system are established in this paper. The multi-dimensional net assessment model covering the life cycle of software is defined by extracting the trustworthy evidences from trustworthy evidence source. The qualitative decisions are converted to quantitative weights through the net assessment method (NAM) combined with fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and entropy weight method (EWM) to determine the weight of the evidence elements in the net assessment model. The paper employs the teleoperation system for interplanetary transportation as a case study. The experimental result drawn shows the validity and rationality of net assessment model and method. In the final part of this paper, the untrustworthy elements of the teleoperation system are discovered and an improvement scheme is established upon the "net result". The work completed in this paper has been applied in the development of the teleoperation system of China's Chang'e-3 (CE-3) "Jade Rabbit-1" and Chang'e-4 (CE-4) "Jade Rabbit-2" rover successfully. Besides, it will be implemented in China's Chang'e-5 (CE-5) mission in 2019. What's more, it will be promoted in the Mars exploration mission in 2020. Therefore it is valuable to the development process improvement of aerospace information system.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.15B no.2
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• pp.95-102
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• 2008

The interactive virtual reality technology has used in scientific inquiry learning since it can overcome the restriction of real world and it draws user's interest and foster active participation. However, prior works are mostly designed for a specific inquiry learning lesson and it is quite difficult to use them for constructing other inquiry learning environments. Hence, we developed the integrated virtual reality system, SASILE (System for Augmenting Scientific Inquiry Learning Environments), that helps ease the development of the scientific inquiry learning environment. In this paper, we first describe the related works on supporting VR scientific inquiry learning systems, followed by the SASILE system architecture and implementation. Then, we illustrate the use of this system to develop a Virtual Moyangsung application for teaching a scientific structure of Korean traditional house by exploring and observing the convection currents as well as a Mars Rover application for estimating the asteroid impacts on Mars by measuring rock properties. Finally, we will discuss the future research directions for this system.

• The Journal of the Petrological Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.245-254
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• 2010

Technology of surface investigation using X-ray is one of widely used technology nowadays. This technique has been numerously used for planetary surface investigations for both orbital and rover scientific instruments. Korea has a plan to send an orbiter and lander to the Moon by the early 2020s. Therefore, the time has come for Korean researchers to develop major scientific instruments and start to do research on basic research for the Moon. Because of this situation, we firstly investigate X-ray technology, which is essential as one of core techniques of planetary remote sensing from the orbit and ground. This paper presents the current status of planetary exploration using X-ray techniques and new development of worldwide X-ray technology which could be adapted for prospective planetary missions.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.240-246
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• 2016

The hottest news and achievements of space science and research in recent years may be NASA Curiosity rover's exploration (2013) of Mars, China Chang'e 3's exploration (2013) of Moon, ESA Rosetta's exploration (2014) of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and NASA New Horizons' exploration (2015) of Pluto, which are very astonishing achievement since such a deep space journey was possible with current technology. In contrast the wonderful cruise and navigation technologies evolution of explorer in deep space, there are no remarkable changes in deep space data communication, it is still in conservative area, of which much changes are reluctantly accepted so far. But there are some movements of deep space exploration in order to allow ground brilliant technologies to deep space. One of those experiments is internet, whose main topic of this paper. In this paper, we will present the analysis of effectiveness of solar system internet to deep space exploration.