A Software-Based Approach to Radiation Mitigation for Planetary Mission

The Perseverance Mars rover needs to drive long distances between regions of scientific interest to collect a diverse set of samples. Position knowledge is needed for navigating to the region of interest. Planetary mobile robots accumulate position uncertainty as they move. Globally localizing the robot to an orbital map of Mars removes this uncertainty. Previously this was performed manually on the ground by humans for mobile surface and aerial robots. This can be accurate but requires communication between planets. This takes significant time and the need for it limits how far Perseverance can autonomously navigate without ground-in-the-loop.The Perseverance Mars rover is in the process of deploying a new onboard global localization capability that has the potential for significantly improving long-distance autonomous navigation. It allows the rover to precisely determine its position by comparing panoramic images from its navigation cameras with high-resolution orbital maps. This paper provides an outline of the development and successful deployment of onboard global localization system on the Perseverance Mars rover and the challenges encountered. Leveraging a fast, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Snapdragon 801 processor from the Ingenuity Helicopter Base Station, the system performs complex image-processing tasks to accurately determine the rover's position relative to orbital maps. This approach overcomes the limitations of the rover's slower, radiation-hardened processor, and is a paradigm shift in planetary robotics.