Path planning and following based on the fast marching method(FMM)/feedback control for lunar exploration rover on digital elevation model(DEM)

When a lunar exploration rover is running on the surface of the Moon on a scientific mission, the integration of various technologies including the navigation and control strategy considering the slippage and geometric singularity is required to enable the exploration rover to traverse while avoiding hazardous areas and following predefined path. Up to this point, this paper proposed a path planning/following algorithm to efficiently navigate the lunar exploration rover and track the predefined path. We first create a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) as infrastructure in simulation environment map based on the diamond-square midpoint displacement algorithm, and then generates the optimal path on the grid map using fast marching method (FMM). In order to let the exploration rover to track the generated path, the path tracking algorithm considering the slippage and geometric singularities based feedback control is also proposed. Using the wheel-terrain interaction model, the multi-body dynamics simulation induced longitudinal/lateral dynamics on the DEM map was carried out to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm. Finally, numerical analysis is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed path planning and path following controller.