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Rover mast calibration, exact camera pointing, and camara handoff for visual target trackingThis paper presents three technical elements that we have developed to improve the accuracy of the visual target tracking for single-sol approach-and-instrument placement in future Mars rover missions. An accurate, straightforward method of rover mast calibration is achieved by using a total station, a camera calibration target, and four prism targets mounted on the rover. The method was applied to Rocky8 rover mast calibration and yielded a 1.1-pixel rms residual error. Camera pointing requires inverse kinematic solutions for mast pan and tilt angles such that the target image appears right at the center of the camera image. Two issues were raised. Mast camera frames are in general not parallel to the masthead base frame. Further, the optical axis of the camera model in general does not pass through the center of the image. Despite these issues, we managed to derive non-iterative closed-form exact solutions, which were verified with Matlab routines. Actual camera pointing experiments aver 50 random target image paints yielded less than 1.3-pixel rms pointing error. Finally, a purely geometric method for camera handoff using stereo views of the target has been developed. Experimental test runs show less than 2.5 pixels error on high-resolution Navcam for Pancam-to-Navcam handoff, and less than 4 pixels error on lower-resolution Hazcam for Navcam-to-Hazcam handoff.
Document ID
20060044172
Acquisition Source
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Document Type
Conference Paper
External Source(s)
Authors
Kim, Won S.
Ansar, Adnan I.
Steele, Robert D.
Date Acquired
August 23, 2013
Publication Date
July 7, 2005
Subject Category
Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence And Robotics
Meeting Information
Meeting: 12th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR ''05)
Location: Seattle, WA
Country: United States
Start Date: July 16, 2005
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Other
Keywords
camera handoff
target approach
camera pointing
visual target tracking
rover mast calibration
robotics

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