A Virtual Reality Mission Planner for Mars Rovers

For the operation of Mars rovers the ground team has a set of utilities to generate safe mission planning. A relevant aspect of such planning are the paths that the rover has to to follow to reach the scientific objectives. For path planning, operators use a combination of orbital and surface imagery to analyze the terrain topography to generate a cost map. Applying path planning algorithms over the cost map it is possible to obtain (sub)optimal solutions to safely drive the rover through different waypoints. As well, the paths obtained can be assessed using simulators and handmade improved by means of Virtual Reality techniques. In this paper we present an integrated planner for the mission planning and its evaluation using the recent technological advances in Virtual Reality. We have developed a low cost application to provide a three-dimensional view of the path generated exploiting real Mars surfaces with the aim of helping operators in deciding the best paths to follow.