Lidar-based Terrain Mapping and Navigation for a Planetary Exploration Rover

This paper presents a terrain mapping and path planning techniques for a planetary exploration rover. A light detection and ranging (LIDAR) is employed in this work to obtain a point cloud data of the terrain feature. A terrain map converted from the point cloud data is represented with a sector-shaped reference grid, resulting in a digital elevation map with the cylindrical coordinate, called CDEM. The path planning uses a cost function composed of terrain inclination, terrain roughness, and path length to generate a route for safer travel. A multi-path planning method with a quantitative evaluation of multiple candidate paths is also proposed to find the most feasible path between the candidates. Field experiments with a rover prototype at a Lunar/Martian analog site confirms the usefulness of the proposed techniques including the LIDAR-based terrain mapping and the multi-path planning method.