LunarNav: Crater-based Localization for Long-range Autonomous Lunar Rover Navigation

The Artemis program requires robotic and crewedlunar rovers for resource prospecting and exploitation, constructionand maintenance of facilities, and human exploration.These rovers must support navigation for 10s of kilometers(km) from base camps. A lunar science rover mission concept(“Endurance-A”) has been recommended by the new DecadalSurvey as the highest priority medium-class mission of theLunar Discovery and Exploration Program, and would be requiredto traverse approximately 2000 km in the South Pole-Aitkin (SPA) Basin, with individual drives of several kilometersbetween stops for downlink. These rover mission scenariosrequire functionality that provides onboard, autonomous, globalposition knowledge (“absolute localization”). However, planetaryrovers have no onboard global localization capability todate; they have only used relative localization, by integratingcombinations of wheel odometry, visual odometry, and inertialmeasurements during each drive to track position relative to thestart of each drive. At the end of each drive, a “ground-inthe-loop” (GITL) interaction is used to get an absolute positionupdate from human operators in a more global reference frame.As a result, autonomous rover drives are limited in distanceso that accumulated relative navigation error does not riskthe possibility of the rover driving into a “keep-out zone”; in