• Journal of the Korean Geosynthetics Society
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.1-8
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• 2023

Space exploration is at the forefront of human scientific endeavors, and planetary exploration rovers play a critical role in studying planetary surfaces. Rover performance is especially vital for safely navigating steep terrain and delicate landscapes found on planets like Mars and the Moon. This paper offers a comprehensive overview of a landing testbed designed to simulate challenging extraterrestrial terrain and loose regolith. The paper briefly outlines lunar crater region topographical features and highlights the importance of these simulations in rover testing. It then explores previous landing testbed developments and describes the design process for a landing testbed to be installed in the dirty thermal vacuum chamber at the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology. Once realized, this proposed landing testbed will enable precise evaluations of rover mobility and exploration capabilities under lunar-like conditions, including high vacuum and extreme temperatures.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.259-267
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• 2020

For real-time precise positioning, N-RTK (Network Real-Time Kinematic) technology is widely used these days. However, the currently operating N-RTK system has a limitation in terms of the number of users. Therefore, if reference points generate correction messages with no limit on the number of users are developed later, it is determined that an appropriate reference point installation interval is required, so that the accuracy of the N-RTK system according to the baseline distance was analyzed. This experiment utilized receivers with varying performance that estimated the rover position, and RTKLIB, an open-source software, is used for processing data. As a result, the rover position was estimated accurately with a high rate of fixed ambiguity for all the receivers. When the reference station with a baseline length of 40 km was used, the vertical RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error) was quite similar to the short baseline case, but only half of the ambiguity fixing rate was achieved. The outlier in the estimated rover position was not observed for the longer baselines in the case of a high-end receiver. It is necessary to analyze the ambiguity fixing and the accuracy of the kinematic positioning with scientific GNSS processing software.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.42 no.5
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• pp.741-749
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• 2022

Major space agencies are planning for the rover-based lunar exploration since water-ice was detected in permanently shadowed regions (PSR). Although sunlight does not directly reach the PSRs, it is expected that reflected sunlight sustains a certain level of low-light environment. In this research, the indoor testbed was made to simulate the PSR's lighting and topological conditions, to which low light enhancement methods (CLAHE, Dehaze, RetinexNet, GLADNet) were applied to restore image brightness and color as well as to investigate their influences on the performance of feature extraction and matching methods (SIFT, SURF, ORB, AKAZE). The experiment results show that GLADNet and Dehaze images in order significantly improve image brightness and color. However, the performance of the feature extraction and matching methods were improved by Dehaze and GLADNet images in order, especially for ORB and AKAZE. Thus, in the lunar exploration, Dehaze is appropriate for building 3D topographic map whereas GLADNet is adequate for geological investigation.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 1986.10a
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• pp.36-40
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• 1986

This paper describes a design of the dynamic robot arm controller with two points of view, robustness and minimum tracking error. A new approach to the robust control of robot arm is developed and an explicit solution for minimum tracking error control is obtained from the regulator problem in the error space given by modifying the tracking problem. This control law is applied to the SCARA robot and the computer simulation is presented.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.24 no.3 s.192
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• pp.100-107
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• 2007

A internal lobe pump is suitable for oil hydraulics of machine tools, automotive engines, compressors, constructions and other various applications. In particular, the pump is an essential machine element of an automotive engine to feed lubricant oil. The subject of this paper is the theoretical analysis of internal lobe pump whose the main components are the rotors: usually the outer one is characterized by lobes with circular shape, while the inner rotor profile is determined as conjugate to the other. The topic of this paper is the design of a new rotor, which is based on specific performance as different types depending on the shape of the lobe of the outer rotor. First, the design of internal lobe pumps with circular, elliptical, and their combined lobe profiles is considered. The latter is a new type of lobe profile with special shape whose curvature follows a definite function. Then we introduce the performance indexes used for the comparison. Some of these indexes, such as flow rate and flow rate irregularity, are commonly used for the comparison, while specific slipping is particularly suitable in this case. It is possible to notice that the circular and elliptical type is comparable to the circular one or the elliptical one in terms of flow rate irregularity, but has improved performance in terms of specific slipping. Results obtained from the analysis enable the designer and manufacturer of oil pump to be more efficient in this field.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.45 no.10
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• pp.836-843
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• 2017

In lunar exploration, the necessity of utilizing rover is verified by the examples of the Soviet Union and China and the similar Mars missions of the United States. In order to achieve the successful management of a lunar rover, a high precision navigation technique is required, and accordingly, high precision initial alignment is essential. Even though it is general to perform initial alignment in a steady state, a multiposition alignment technique is applied when high performance is needed. On the lunar surface, however, the performance of initial alignment decreases from that on Earth, and it cannot be improved by applying multiposition alignment method owing to certain constraints of lunar environment. In this paper, a sun sensor aided multiposition alignment technique is proposed. The measurement model for a sun vector is established, and its observability analysis is performed. The performance of the proposed algorithm is verified through computer simulations, and the results show the estimation performance is improved dramatically.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.479-486
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• 2018

In order to ensure reliable navigation performance of a lunar exploration rover, navigation algorithms using additional sensors such as inertial measurement units and cameras are essential on lunar surface in the absence of a global navigation satellite system. Unprecedentedly, Visual Odometry (VO) using a stereo camera has been successfully implemented at the US Mars rovers. In this paper, we estimate the 6-DOF pose of the lunar exploration rover from gray images of a lunar-like terrains. The proposed algorithm estimates relative pose of consecutive images by sparse image alignment based semi-direct VO. In order to overcome vulnerability to non-linearity of direct VO, we add adaptive motion prior weights calculated from a linear function of the previous pose to the optimization cost function. The proposed algorithm is verified in lunar-like terrain dataset recorded by Toronto University reflecting the characteristics of the actual lunar environment.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.240-246
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• 2016

The hottest news and achievements of space science and research in recent years may be NASA Curiosity rover's exploration (2013) of Mars, China Chang'e 3's exploration (2013) of Moon, ESA Rosetta's exploration (2014) of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and NASA New Horizons' exploration (2015) of Pluto, which are very astonishing achievement since such a deep space journey was possible with current technology. In contrast the wonderful cruise and navigation technologies evolution of explorer in deep space, there are no remarkable changes in deep space data communication, it is still in conservative area, of which much changes are reluctantly accepted so far. But there are some movements of deep space exploration in order to allow ground brilliant technologies to deep space. One of those experiments is internet, whose main topic of this paper. In this paper, we will present the analysis of effectiveness of solar system internet to deep space exploration.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.403-412
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• 2016

Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars(CRISM) is 489-band hyperspectral camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter(MRO) that provided data used on many mineral researches over Martian surface. For the detection of minerals in planet, mineral index using a few spectral bands have been used. In this study, we applied Matched Filter and Adaptive Cosine Estimator(ACE) target detection algorithm on CRISM data over Gusev Crater: landing site of Spirit(Mars Exploration Rover A) to investigate its mineral distribution. As a result, olivine, pyroxene, magnetite, etc. is detected at Gusev Crater's Columbia Hills. These results are corresponding to the Spirit rover's field survey result. It is expected that hyperspectral target detection algorithms can be used as effective and easy to use method for the detection and mapping of surface minerals in planet.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.372-377
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• 2015

In this paper, the consideration factors that affect the actual driving of a rover wheel was examined based on the wheel-terrain model. For the evaluation of driving performance in a real environment, the test bed of the rover wheel consists of the driving part of the wheel and sensing part of the various parameters was designed and assembled. Using the test bed, the preliminary driving experiment concerning the slip ratio, sinkage, and friction force according to the rotational velocity and the shape of the wheel were carried out and evaluated. The wheel test bed and the experiment results are expected to contribute to finding the optimal result in the designing of the wheel shape and the planning of the driving conditions through further study.