The Katwijk beach planetary rover dataset

Abstract

This paper describes a dataset collected along a 1 km section of beach near Katwijk, The Netherlands, which was populated with a collection of artificial rocks of varying sizes to emulate known rock size densities at current and potential Mars landing sites. First, a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle collected georeferenced images of the entire area. Then, the beach was traversed by a rocker-bogie-style rover equipped with a suite of sensors that are envisioned for use in future planetary rover missions. These sensors, configured so as to emulate the ExoMars rover, include stereo cameras, and time-of-flight and scanning light-detection-and-ranging sensors. This dataset will be of interest to researchers developing localization and mapping algorithms for vehicles traveling over natural and unstructured terrain in environments that do not have access to the global navigation satellite system, and where only previously taken satellite or aerial imagery is available.

SLAM for autonomous planetary rovers with global localization

“…The heavy duty planetary rover (HDPR) lab rover prototype has been used for the experimental validation of the developed algorithm. HDPR (Boukas & Hewitt, 2016; Hewitt et al, 2018), depicted in Figure 9, bears close resemblance, in terms of sensing camera setup, to the ExoMars mission rover (Vago & Westall, 2017). Its powerful locomotion system, capable of moving at speeds of up to 1 m/s, makes this rover a very suitable research platform for long range experiments with focus on different sensor integration and data fusion and algorithms for autonomous navigation.…”

“…The test campaign lasted for 10 days, during which HDPR performed different experiments with the objectives of: sensor data set collection, teleoperation in the dark areas (night‐time) and ExoMars‐like remote rover operations. While the authors are working on publishing the results and data set collected during the field test campaign, as previously done for the data set publication in (Hewitt et al, 2018), part of the collected data set has been utilized for the experimental validation of the GA SLAM algorithm.…”

The Canadian Planetary Emulation Terrain Energy-Aware Rover Navigation Dataset

“…However, these datasets mainly focus on (feature-rich) urban environments and well-known landmarks, and neither contains geometric data (such as stereo imagery or aerial elevation maps). Our ground images and aerial maps are more extensive than those provided by Hewitt et al (2018), and include georeferenced slope and aspect plots, depicting a terrain with a richer set of planetary features (such as inclines, cliff faces, and small craters).…”

“…The main purpose of this dataset is also localization research. Finally, the Katwijk Beach Planetary Rover Dataset includes logged data from a rover testbed similar to the ExoMars rover, driven in a flat beach environment containing artificial obstacles; georeferenced aerial maps captured by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are also available, simulating the resolution of the orbital mapping data that is currently available for Mars (Hewitt et al, 2018). However, none of these planetary navigation datasets incorporate solar energy generation estimates or power consumption information; in addition, none provide color omnidirectional stereo and monocular visual data at the scale of the dataset described herein.…”

Efficient autonomous navigation for planetary rovers with limited resources

“…The rover used for these tests is the Heavy Duty Planetary Rover (HDPR; Boukas & Hewitt, 2016; Hewitt et al, 2018) from ESA's Planetary Robotics Lab (PRL; PRL, 2018), on which we mounted a Bumblebee 2 (BB2‐08S2C‐25; FLIR Bumblebee 2, 2018) as the stereo camera in a location imitating the perspective of the LocCam on ExoMars (see Figure 9). The Bumblebee 2 has a wider FoV than the original ExoMars LocCam.…”