Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The ability to determine the position of a rover in an inertial frame autonomously is a crucial capability necessary for the next generation of surface rover missions on other planetary bodies. Currently, most on-going rover missions utilize ground-in-the-loop interventions to manually correct for drift in the position estimate, and this human supervision bottlenecks the distance over which rovers can operate autonomously and carry out scientific measurements. In this article, we present ShadowNav, an autonomous approach for global 2-D localization on the Moon with an emphasis on driving in darkness and at nighttime. Our approach uses the leading edge of Lunar craters as landmarks and a particle filtering approach to associate detected craters with known ones on an offboard map. We discuss the key design decisions in developing the ShadowNav framework for use with a Lunar rover concept equipped with a stereo camera and an external illumination source. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach in both a Lunar simulation environment and on data collected during a field test at Cinder Lakes, AZ, USA.
Institutions: California Institute of Technology, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Language: English
Subfield: Aerospace Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4403059379