Path Planning for Planetary Exploration

Abstract

In this paper we present the work done at the Canadian Space Agency on the problem of planetary exploration. One of the main goals is the over-the-horizon navigation of a mobile robot on a Mars like environment. A key component is the ability to plan a path using maps of different resolutions and also to refine/replan when more data becomes available. Our algorithms on path planning and path segmentation are presented together with results from two years of experiments in realistic conditions.