Path Planning of Rovers Using
Fuzzy Logic and Genetic Algorithms

This project is supported by NASA. The goal of the project is to develop a path planner by taking into account terrain roughness, rover mobility characteristics and path feasibility.

Images of the terrain are used to build a 3-D map of the environment. However, due to the ambiguity an misinterpretation involved in extracting information from images, the problem is set and solved in a fuzzy and approximate reasoning framework. A set of fuzzy rules relate the rock heights and sizes to a terrain roughness array.

The path planner takes the terrain roughness, and uses a genetic algorithm to path the path. Several genetic operators have been designed for this purpose. A suitable fitness function that combines terrain roughness, path curvature and length is formulated to obtain the best path.