We believe that our effort can be sustained by our unique capability and experience, which we believe is valuable to emerging lunar-rover activities in Canada, Japan, and India / Russia. The market for lunar-rover autonomy is not large but it is highly technical and critical to mission success. ProtoInnovations intends to continue R&D to position itself as a world leader in rover navigation software and experience. Commercially-available, high-resolution positioning systems have been maturing rapidly over the past decade and have penetrated into agricultural, mining, and defense markets. Most of these products filter GPS data with measurements from IMUs, encoders, and so on. Such products are robust to brief GPS drop-outs but are not robust to long-term GPS losses. Such losses are frequent in urban areas or in dense foliage, and should be expected indoors and when GPS signals are jammed. When GPS is lost, inertial measurements and dead-reckoning drift and the resulting localization error increases over time and distance traveled. SLAM is an ideal way of correcting these errors without the need for infrastructure. Our SLAM approach, with its computational efficiency and loose requirements on operating environment, is a feasible add-on technology for commercially available positioning systems.
Technical innovations from this project will have immediate application to the Lunar All-Terrain Utility Vehicle (LATUV) and will enable it to achieve its full capability as it becomes a research appliance for NASA. We also see direct applicability of this work to vehicles developed by NASA for scientific exploration, habitat construction, and landing site preparation. ProtoInnovations will seek to sustain this work by providing SLAM capability to a wide range of planetary rover vehicles and prototypes.
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