Terrain Adaptive Navigation for planetary rovers

This paper describes the design, implementation, and experimental results of a navigation system for planetary rovers called Terrain Adaptive Navigation (TANav). This system was designed to enable greater access to and more robust operations within terrains of widely varying slippage. The system achieves this goal by using onboard stereo cameras to remotely classify surrounding terrain, predict the slippage of that terrain, and use this information in the planning of a path to the goal. This navigation system consists of several integrated techniques: goodness map generation, terrain triage, terrain classification, remote slip prediction, path planning, high-fidelity traversability analysis (HFTA), and slip-compensated path following. Results from experiments with an end-to-end onboard implementation of the TANav system in a Mars analog environment are shown and compared to results from experiments with a more traditional navigation system that does not account for terrain properties.