Absolute Navigation for Ground Vehicles for Planetary Exploration

The Problem: There is no GPS (absolute positioning) on Mars ndash; nor on any other extraterrestrial body of scientific interest. All existing navigation solutions for rover/robotic platforms provide only relative navigation capabilities, which drift off over time and are not sufficiently accurate for many scientific missions of interest.nbsp; Future autonomous robotics missions will require an absolute positioning (GPS-like) capability, particularly for longer missions that lastnbsp;on the order ofnbsp;months or years (e.g., the Mars rover missions).nbsp;nbsp;The Solution: OKSI proposes an Absolute Positioning System (APS) that would provide a day-night GPS-like navigation solution for ground-based robots. The solution is based upon matching real-time imagery captured by the rover to a pre-existing georeferenced satellite imagery database. Specifically, a rover platform would leverage available lofted on-board wide FOV cameras (e.g., Figure 1) to construct a full or partial birds-eye view NADIR projection of the surrounding scene. Then, the rover would take this projection of the surrounding scene and would match it to a georeferenced satellite database for the planet or body of interest. Once the real-time image is matched, it will be georeferenced via the database and then the pose of the platform can be extracted.nbsp;