2022 Volume 70 Issue 6 Pages 208-214
Planetary rovers need to plan a safe route to ensure the success of their mission. Many missions to the Moon and Mars use existing remote sensing data to plan their exploration routes before launch under the assumption that the data is correct. For example, digital elevation models (DEMs) are biased in their accuracy depending on the density of their source data. Most studies of advance path planning using DEMs do not account for that uncertainty. Therefore, the path planned in advance is not necessarily safe for the actual rover. In this paper, we propose a path planning method that is robust against the uncertainty of terrain data generated from remote sensing data. Simulations using real data confirmed that the route planned by this method is safer than these two conventional methods: 1) route planning that assumes the topographic data is correct, and 2) route planning that adds Gaussian noise to the DEM to generate multiple DEMs and treats their variance as uncertainty.
