Development of Visual Remote Operation System for Low-Gravity Planet Rover

In this paper, the authors propose a visual remote operation system of the vehicle type of mobile robot for lunar exploration, i.e., the low-gravity planet rover. This rover has a unique mechanical part to shift its center of gravity, namely COG shift box, for its high-speed and stable driving. High-resolution Wide Angle Fovea (WAF) sensor, equipped on the rover, characterizes our proposed visual remote operation system as follows: (1) High-Resolution WAF sensor provides the operator with enough wide-angle field of view (FOV) to achieve safe navigation of the rover. (2) The view direction control of High-Resolution WAF sensor, by the eye-tracking device embedded on HMD, enables the operator to observe targets, to which he/she should pay attention, more in detail in order to make his/her better decision of navigating the rover. In addition, by displaying images remapped from the input image of High-Resolution WAF sensor, we expect to solve the bottleneck problem of data transmission. (3) The input image from High-Resolution WAF sensor is also applied for autonomous navigation of the rover.