ABSOLUTE MAP-BASED LOCALIZATION FOR A PLANETARY ROVER

Navigating autonomously several kilometers in a plane-tary context without any communication with Earth oper-ators raises several challenges. Among those, precise lo-calization is of essential importance, and the availability of orbital data yields the possibility to estimate absolute position information. This paper proposes an approach that exploits a priori Digital Elevation Maps derived from orbiter data and on-board stereo imagery to estimate the absolute rover position. The approach extends the clas-sic particle-filter based global localization scheme to the context of planetary rovers, where the environment is not structured. The article details the various required func-tions, the way each particle likelihood is evaluated, and means to manage a short number of particles. Experi-mental results illustrates the approach. 1.