Planetary rover localization within orbital maps

This paper introduces an advanced rover localization system suitable for autonomous planetary exploration in the absence of Global Positioning System (GPS) infrastructure. Given an existing terrain map (image and elevation) obtained from satellite imagery and the images provided by the rover stereo camera system, the proposed method determines the best rover location through visual odometry, 3D terrain and horizon matching. The system is tested on data retrieved from a 3 km traverse of the Basalt Hills quarry in California where the GPS track is used as ground truth. Experimental results show the system presented here reduces by over 60% the localization error obtained by wheel odometry.