Department Publications

In planetary rover missions, there exist severe communication constraints, which make it difficult to control rovers from a long distance (eg from the Earth). Therefore, there is a need to address the important issue of onboard local autonomy to allow deployed rovers to make their own decisions, which contributes to increased scientific return. To achieve this, robot algorithms should be constantly improved and innovative hardware mechanisms should be sought. In this context, simulators play a major role as they can help researchers develop novel technologies even without having access to expensive hardware components. In this paper, the authors present ongoing work on the planetary rover simulation environment that have been developed for testing and validating autonomous navigation of a planetary exploration rover using opensource tools. The simulation system has been developed using Gazebo, an open source 3D multi-robot simulation framework and ROS. The developed simulator provides an essential tool for visualization of the rover functionality for many state-of-art algorithms.