Modular Design for Planetary Rover Autonomous Navigation Software using ROS

Abstract

is paper presents a modular design concept of autonomous navigation software for planetary rovers. e software covers major navigation functions such as autonomous localisation and mapping, visual rock detection, and path planning. e proposed design includes a generic data pipeline which produces a sequence of data products based on sensory raw data. To effectively and efficiently integrate the various design elements, Robot Operating System (known as ROS) is used as the middleware framework to implement the generic data pipeline and synthesize various navigation functions in terms of ROS nodes. e paper also presents test results of the proposed software implemented within the Surrey Rover Autonomous Software and Hardware Testbed (SMART) based on real and artificial data.