Overcoming the Challenges of Solar Rover Autonomy: Enabling Long-Duration Planetary Navigation
It addresses the problem of achieving autonomous long-duration navigation for solar rovers on Mars, which is crucial for future planetary exploration missions, but is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks and surveys recent work.
The paper reviews the mobility planning framework for current Mars rovers and surveys challenges in enabling solar-powered rovers to autonomously navigate long distances, such as over 150 meters per sol for months, to support missions like NASA's Mars Sample Return.
The successes of previous and current Mars rovers have encouraged space agencies worldwide to pursue additional planetary exploration missions with more ambitious navigation goals. For example, NASA's planned Mars Sample Return mission will be a multi-year undertaking that will require a solar-powered rover to drive over 150 metres per sol for approximately three months. This paper reviews the mobility planning framework used by current rovers and surveys the major challenges involved in continuous long-distance navigation on the Red Planet. It also discusses recent work related to environment-aware and energy-aware navigation, and provides a perspective on how such work may eventually allow a solar-powered rover to achieve autonomous long-distance navigation on Mars.