Absolute Navigation and Positioning of Mars Rover Using Gravity-Aided Odometry

Positioning and Navigation (PN) of Martian rovers still faces challenges due to limited observations. In this paper, the PN feasibilities of Mars rovers based on a Gravity-aided Odometry (GO) system are proposed and investigated in terms of numeric simulations and a case study. Statistical features of the Mars gravity field are studied to evaluate the feature diversity of the background map. The Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm is introduced to match gravity measurements with the gravitational map. The trajectories of Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) and Mars Gravity Map 2011 (MGM2011) are used to complete the experiments. Several key factors of GO including odometry errors, measurement uncertainties, and grid resolution of the map are investigated to evaluate their influences on the positioning ability of the system. Simulated experiments indicate that the GO method could provide an alternative positioning solution for Martian surface rovers.