Incorporation of Depth Feed for Prototype Rover Video and Other Usability Improvements

Abstract

NASA has been mandated by the US government to return to the moon within the next five years, meaning that functional technology for lunar exploration must be developed and tested in order to reach that goal. While most lunar exploration vehicles can be operated using a supervisory control scheme, utilizing a direct human control scheme would allow missions and navigation be more robust to unforeseen events and obstacles. Because any human-teleoperated lunar mission would involve significant time delay, low video resolution, and low framerate, video feeds need to be augmented to grant human navigators additional information about the rover's surroundings. This work proposes two new video feed options for an existing prototype lunar rover that utilize an Intel D435 depth camera to provide a depth image stream of the rover's surroundings and an augmented reality (AR) depth overlay on a mono RGB video stream. The video feeds proposed in this work have been proven to function within the rover's current architecture, and can correctly simulate the conditions a navigating user would experience when attempting to teleoperate the rover at a lunar distance. This work also proposes usability improvements to the User Heads-Up Display based on previous test feedback to reduce onscreen clutter for navigating users, and a data visualization program to reduce data analysis time for testers and increase clarity when presenting data.