Neural Network Model for Path-Planning of Robotic Rover Systems

Abstract: Today, robotics is an auspicious and fast-growing branch of technology that involves the manufacturing, design, and maintenance of robot machines that can operate in an autonomous fashion and can be used in a wide variety of applications including space exploration, weaponry, household, and transportation. More particularly, in space applications, a common type of robots has been of widespread use in the recent years. It is called planetary rover which is a robot vehicle that moves across the surface of a planet and conducts detailed geological studies pertaining to the properties of the landing cosmic environment. However, rovers are always impeded by obstacles along the traveling path which can destabilize the rover's body and prevent it from reaching its goal destination. This paper proposes an ANN model that allows rover systems to carry out autonomous path-planning to successfully navigate through challenging planetary terrains and follow their goal location while avoiding dangerous obstacles. The proposed ANN is a multilayer network made out of three layers: an input, a hidden, and an output layer. The network is trained in offline mode using back-propagation supervised learning algorithm. A software-simulated rover was experimented and it revealed that it was able to follow the safest trajectory despite existing obstacles. As future work, the proposed ANN is to be parallelized so as to speed-up the execution time of the training process.