NASA's ERNEST Rover Advances Autonomous Technology for Future Moon and Mars Exploration - Clarksville Online - EUROPE SAYS
The initial goal of the team that developed ERNEST was mechanical: to design a relatively simple, low-cost rover that advances the trustedrocker-bogie suspension systemfeatured on every Mars rover since. . .
The initial goal of the team that developed ERNEST was mechanical: to design a relatively simple, low-cost rover that advances the trustedrocker-bogie suspension systemfeatured on every Mars rover since NASA’s Sojourner. This passive system keeps relatively constant weight on all six wheels, thanks to pivot points and struts that enable each one to adapt to the changing surface. Developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ERNEST (Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain) is used in a desert field test to help refine mobility hardware and autonomy software that could be used for a potential future long-range lunar rover mission. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)On ERNEST, theactive suspensionlets the rover manage weight distribution among its wheels. Two powered joints in front articulate a gimbal that allows the rover to drive using different gaits like squirming, wheel-walking, and obstacle-climbing. With a clutch mechanism, it can switch between active and passive suspension, which is less terrain capable but more energy efficient. With four steerable wheels, it can drive in any direction, including sideways. “We started by postulating that we could do better in designing a planetary surface robotic mobility system,” said Hari Nayar, a JPL principal technologist leading the ERNEST team. “While the rocker-bogie system has been very successful over the past 30 years, there’s been a lot of research in that time on mobility and understanding terrain interaction. ”Before arriving at today’s version of ERNEST, the team builttwo earlier prototypes, each about 2 feet (0. 6 meters) long, to test 11 active suspension configurations. In a trailer filled with lunar regolith simulant, they ran experiments at different slope angles over several months before landing on a final design. Engineers from JPL set up illuminators after transporting ERNEST for a pre-sunrise test during a seven-day desert field campaign. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)Then the team scaled up, including adding a rectangular head mounted on a 4. 5-foot-tall (1. 4-meter-tall) mast. The hardware was completed in September 2024, but the rover still needed a human operator to joystick it, sending commands to instruct the rover on how to move over obstacles. In order to train the rover to think on its own, the ERNEST team turned to reinforcement learning, a type of artificial intelligence where the robot learns by interacting with its environment. TheDynamics and Real-Time Simulation Laboratoryat JPL developed a high-fidelity virtual testing environment that replicates the rover’s behavior. The team fed the simulator data collected by engineers who documented the response of the actual rover hardware to a variety of terrain types. On a high-performance computing cluster, the team ran many simulations at once, sometimes completing thousands of hours of tests over a single weekend. After months of virtual training, the ERNEST team was ready to see if the rover could use its new autonomous algorithms to figure out how to drive over terrain features that would halt a passive-suspension rover. They set up an obstacle course with sand ripples, rubble piles, steps, and steep slopes in JPL’s Mars Yard, an outdoor terrain proving ground. Then they watched as the rover maneuvered the terrain on its own. Since then, ERNEST has completed many such courses. Nayar’s team is starting a new autonomy project which involves integrating the rover’s ability to determine when and how to use its active suspension with longer-range intelligent navigation. The goal is to enable ERNEST to plan an efficient path so that it can tackle surmountable obstacles and circumnavigate hazardous ones. These capabilities could contribute to potential future rover missions encountering formidable landscapes on Mars or more rugged areas of the Moon. Work on ERNEST began in 2022 was initially supported by JPL internal research and development funds. It is currentlyfunded byNASA’s Mars Exploration Program and the agency’s Exploration Science Strategy and Integration Office in its Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA. Tags:americaFeaturedmarsmoonnasaNASA's ERNEST RoverNASA's Jet Propulsion LaboratoryNASA's Mars Perseverance RoverNASA's Mars rover CuriosityNASA's Sojourner RoverNational Aeronautics and Space AdministrationsciencetechnologyUnited Statesunited states of americaUSUSAWashington D. C.