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Planetary Rover Path Planning Based on Improved A* Algorithm

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11743))

Abstract

Developing a space rover with ability to explore robustly and autonomously the unknown outer space landscape like Moon and Mars has always been a major challenge, since the first roving remote-controlled robot, Lunokhod 1, landed on the moon. Path planning is one of important task when the rover travels a certain distance without the human control. To traverse safely on the harsh and complex planetary surface, the terrain environmental information and the ability of the roving vehicle to overcome obstacles should be taken into account. In this paper, an improved A* algorithm is proposed via introducing both the environmental characteristics (such as surface slope and surface toughness) and the rover’s traversability as the constraint conditions. Comparison of the performance of the proposed A* algorithm relative to the original A* algorithm is conducted based on MATLAB platform. Numerical simulations indicate that the improved A* algorithm has shorter path and higher planning success rate.

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Acknowledgment

The author would like to acknowledge the support from the Advanced Research Project of Manned Space under Grant No. 0603(17700630), the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61803075, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant No. ZYGX2018KYQD211.

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Correspondence to Xiaomei Xie .

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Wu, W. et al. (2019). Planetary Rover Path Planning Based on Improved A* Algorithm. In: Yu, H., Liu, J., Liu, L., Ju, Z., Liu, Y., Zhou, D. (eds) Intelligent Robotics and Applications. ICIRA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11743. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27538-9_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27538-9_29

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-27537-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-27538-9

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