Research On Lunar Rover Localization And Navigation Based On Wireless Sensor Network

The only natural satellite of the Earth is the Moon, which is the first step for human to explore outer space. There are about sixty different kinds of rich minerals and new energy, which has huge potential economic significance. Thus, exploring the moon and establishing the moon base has become the inevitable trend of the world space activities and hot competition. In February 2004, Chinese defense department and country space department announced our Moon exploring plan---"Chang'e"project. At present, the second stage of the"Chang'e"project is well prepared, in which one of the key research contents is lunar rover localization and navigation in the moon environment.Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a multi-hop self-organizing wireless network system, which is consisted of a large amount of cheap sensor nodes deployed in the monitoring area, and communicates with each other by the RF wave. Its purpose is to collaborate to sense, collect, process the information in the monitoring area and finally send them to observer. WSN is an emerging information acquistion and processing technology which intergrates sensor technology, MEMS technology and communication technology. It shows extensive application prospect, thus becoming a hot research area in international research.Under the support of National Natural Science Foundation of China---Grant No. 60535010, we propose a novel lunar rover localization and navigation method based on WSN, which contains as fellows:1. Presents a robust and distributed localization algorithm in WSN. Whether in regular networks or irregular networks, the proposed algorithm can improve sensor node localization accuracy, especially in the irregular networks.2. Presents a novel lunar rover localization method conbining laser localization and WSN. We give the lunar rover's localization system and use Lidar to realize high localization accuracy of lunar rover. When the Lidar cannot be used due to large obstacles, we will enhance the lunar rover localization by deploying more anchors along with the projection of large obstacles.3. Conducts a series of measurement experiment based on RSSI and mobile robot localization and navigation experiments. In our experiment platform, we evaluate and validate RSSI based lunar rover localization and navigation.