Traversability-Aware Planning with Dynamic Speed Profiling for Planetary Exploration

Autonomous navigation on unstructured and uneven terrain remains a critical challenge for planetary rovers, requiring both safe path planning and adaptive speed control. Traditional occupancy or elevation maps often fail to capture the full complexity of terrain hazards and rover mobility constraints. We present a global planning framework that integrates traversability analysis with velocity profile estimation. Local terrain features such as slope, step height, and roughness are extracted from elevation data and normalized by roverspecific parameters including maximum admissible slope and ground clearance. These form a costmap used in graph-based global planning, while the planner simultaneously adjusts target speeds to safely negotiate terrain hazards. Our method produces dynamically feasible trajectories that improve autonomous exploration capabilities in challenging planetary environments. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach improves safety by 44%, reduces maximum terrain hazard by over 10%, and decreases traversal time by nearly 10% compared to state-of-the-art planners.