Mission-Integrated Path Planning for Planetary Rover Exploration

This paper presents a mission planning method for planetary rover. As a decision support system, mission planning is important for rover navigation and control. Generating travel path and task sequence synchronously is the key point. In this paper, the environment model of planetary surface is summed up as two parts which are obstacle map and timeline. According to this, the mission planner utilizes state space search method for path planning on obstacle map. When expanding state, it executes task sequence planning and scheduling on timeline. Experimental results showed that this method could conduct the path planning and task sequence planning synchronously, which proved the viability of the method.