The Basic Idea

Viper is a "smart" teleoperation interface which analyzes images sent by a mobile robot in space missions and helps the human teleoperator on Earth. Teleoperation of mobile robots is a difficult and stressing task; it is well-known that remote drivers get lost easily, despite having maps and visible landmarks. Our goal is to reduce the cognitive load on teleoperators by providing cues that help prevent them getting lost and disoriented.

The basic idea, illustrated by the figure below, follows these steps:

1. the system receives the images from the rover;
2. features extracted from the images and from a digital elevation map of the region are matched to estimate the rover's position;
3. visual cues are overlayed on the images and on the map to aid the user on teleoperation tasks.

We call the system VIPER, for VIsual Position EstimatoR.

More information about VIPER

• Detailed information on the current implementation is available (still in construction!).
• Papers related to the system:
  • Automatic Mountain Detection and Pose Estimation for Teleoperation of Lunar Rovers, is the most recent paper about the system, presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, New Mexico, 1997.
  • Position Estimation from Outdoor Visual Landmarks for Teleoperation of Lunar Rovers, is a concise, and older, description of VIPER and our earlier developments (paper in the Third IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision).
  • Depth from Scattering, describes some ideas developed when working with VIPER, in this case the possibility of recovering depth from scattering in outdoor environments (paper in the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Puerto Rico, 1997.
• Maps and images that we have used to test the system.

Related Information

We have not been able to find much information online about outdoor position estimation, but if you find something, please let us know. There are many excellent printed papers about outdoor localization, about positioning and navigation for space rovers, etc. A (very) brief sample is given in the references in our earlier system description.

• Professor Thompson and his group at University of Utah have done a great job at analyzing the process by which humans attain localization "from views of outdoor environments and maps representing topographic information". Their data, and related papers, are available.
• To test any outdoor localization system, chances are that you will need Earth topographic maps. USGS (United States Geological Survey) is the source for this information in the United States.