NevadaSat Autonomous Rover, Final Testing 2007

Three successful runs of the outdoor navigation and retrieval task were conducted on a dry lake bed near Cold Springs, Nevada. The test was set up as follows: A cansat device was placed on the ground attached to a colored parachute. To simulate the circumstances of a real launch, a small tower was constructed next to the CanSat/parachute location on the ground and a second CanSat was placed on top of the tower that would do radio transmission as the "gps beacon". The robot was placed about 800 meters away. The location of the CanSat was not provided to the robot.

A no-go zone was defined arbitrarily by collecting and entering GPS coordinates in our A* Map Tool, then generating a map file for the test area. Small orange traffic cones were placed to mark the no-go zone, which roughly bisected the direct path between Rover and CanSat. This insured that if the Rover did not perform path planning to avoid the no-go zone, it would noticeably travel right through it.