Dynamic mission-level path planning for lunar rovers

Aimed at practical need of mission-level path planning for lunar rovers, a new environment modeling technology has been put forward, taking account of both lunar terrain features and solar energy effect. Besides traversability analysis of lunar terrain, a new solar energy assessment is computed considering both solar elevation angle and terrain features. Mobility and operation constraints of lunar rover are also considered in modeling the environment. As some factors of the environment varies regularly when traversing on the moon, a dynamic mission-level path searching method was developed. Environment is updated and path is re-planned at some frequency determined by the varying factor. The whole mission-level path from start to goal is a split joint of these path segments. The simulation results show that the synthesized environment model describes all the factors and their effects on lunar traverse properly; the dynamic path searching method implements mission-level path planning for lunar rovers under time-varying environments.