It is required to understand the environment to explore unknown areas on the moon or other planets. Due to the limitation of bit rate or time delay, on-board decision based on AI can make the rovers to explore efficiently. So Kubota Lab. is promoting some research on vision system for planetary exploration, image processing, recognition algorithm, terrain mapping, sensor fusion, obstacle detection, natural terrain understanding, visual tracking etc.

It is important to traverse lunar or planetary surface safely and flexibly without stacking on sandy terrain. New mobility system is also required to explore in lower gravity such as the moon, Mars, asteroids or comets. So Kubota lab. is promoting some research on walking robot with multiple legs, mole type robot for subsurface exploration, mobility system for wheeled robots, novel rover under micro gravity environment, insect typed micro probe robot etc.

It is important to develop autonomous rovers with AI to explore unknown environment efficientlty and effectively such as the moon, Mars, asteroid, etc. Kubota Lab. is studying intelligent path planning for rover, SLAM technology, behavior planning, terrain map making for traverse, self-, exploration strategy planner, machine learning for optimal exploration, etc.

Recently exploration missions have been bigger and required a lot cost and time to develop spacecrafts. That is why, a game changing is required, such as small explores cooperated mission compared with one big explorer. Kubota lab. is studying swarm robot system, self-organized mapping scheme, biometric approach, distributed system, coordination and cooperation functions, etc.