Abstract
In recent years, rover missions for exploring lunar or planetary surface has been attracting much attention over the world, culminating the success of the Sojourner rover which explored the Martian surface in 1997.
This paper proposes a new path planning method for navigation of planetary rovers, the surface environment of which is a natural terrain and described by a digital elevation map (DEM) . Given a DEM, a path from a start point to a goal is calculated based on the simple rover model which consists of three parameters. An obstacle map and a new concept of an extended elevation map defined in three dimensional space are introduced which provides the capability to use the DEM height information in three dimensional configuration space. With this extended elevation map, path planning is conducted by solving an optimization problem. Numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
