To give some context, the purpose of VT Astrobotics was to design and build an autonomous Mars rover for a NASA-sponsored competition and compete against teams nationwide. The rules were that we were given 10 min for the rover to traverse an obstacle field and mine valuable Mars regolith deep into the ground autonomously.
During the first year on the Autonomy team, I mainly worked on the overall ROS system in communicating the different sensor topics to allow path planning and positioning throughout the run. For positioning, there were several techniques we experimented with, which included some form of triangulation the first year; we used USB cameras and April Tags which are QR codes to have position and orientation throughout the run. The GUI to keep track of critical metrics like voltages, currents, robot speed, etc., was done in Python utilizing PyQT.
In my second year on the team, I was the autonomy team lead. This time for the vision system, we used the Hokuyo Lidar, which gives us a 3D point cloud around the surrounding area, allowing us to use that input to create the best path possible. 2nd year we went with an off-the-shelf system called Pozyx, which uses Ultrawide Band technology to communicate with the beacon placed at the starting point to the two anchors placed on the robot to perform the trilateration to get position and orientation. Below I go into an overview of our journey through Astrobotics.
2018 VT Astrobotics Team Design
2019 VT Astrobotics Team Design