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In this paper, a navigation and environment mapping method is presented for small exploration robots that use hopping motion. While previous research about hopping rovers mostly focuses on mobility and mechanical design, the motivation for the proposed method is to provide a fully autonomous navigation system using only a monocular camera. The method accurately estimates the hopping distance and reconstruct the 3D environment using Structure from Motion, proving that a monocular system is not only feasible, but accurate and robust at the same time. The relative scale problem of the reconstructed scene and trajectory is solved by the known gravity and parabolic motion constraints. After each hop, the error in landing position is corrected by a modified Iterative Closest Point algorithm with non-overlapping part elimination. The environmental point cloud is projected onto a 2D image, that is used to find the most suitable landing position for the next hop using protrusion based obstacle detection, and navigate the robot towards the goal direction. Both virtual environment simulations and real experiments confirm the feasibility and highlight the advantages of the presented method.

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In this paper, a landmark selection and tracking approach is presented for mobile robot navigation in natural environments, using textural distinctiveness-based saliency detection and spati...

Robots such as exploration rovers are widely used in planetary missions and tasks on the earth. The missions of these robots are mainly resource discovery and sample return, and various other tasks can be considered. Because it is a large robot, it can have many mounted devices and functions. On the other hand, as the size of the system increases, the development cost becomes enormous, and a long development period is required. In addition, because the loss cost of the robot is high, the robot is run with safety as a priority, and it cannot be said that search efficiency is good. In order to counter these problems, we have proposed a distributed exploration system using multiple small robots. This exploration system is examining a jumping parent robot and a ground traveling child robot. In this paper, the ground running robot SPET which is a child robot is explained. The child robot acts based on the positional relationship with the parent rover. In addition, since it is possible to travel on uneven terrain, posture estimation is also necessary. So, a compact and lightweight attitude / position estimation system for a compact robot with limited mass resources is needed. SPET has been developed to verify the exploration algorithm of the exploration system. In recent years, robots on the earth are expected to perform similar tasks at disaster sites and construction sites. In the future, the airframe will be improved, and practical applications in ground environments such as construction sites are being considered.