Camera Assisted Navigation for Planetary Rover

Robotic rovers sent for planetary exploration are largely tele-operated by ground based drivers, thus there is some difficulties in keeping track of a planetary rover’s movements especially in undiscovered environment. These ground based drivers generate commands using the 3D visual images sent by the planetary rovers and these commands take a certain amount of time to execute due to communication lag. It is for this particular reason that the commands are usually only generated once every Martian solar day (sol). This leads to an increasing need for an onboard real time autonomous reliable navigation solution. This paper proposes a camera-assisted inertial odometry suitable for planetary environments where GPS cannot be employed. The effectiveness of the proposed solution has been established using the open source bench mark KITTI dataset.