Roaming the Red Planet: Revolutionizing Mars Exploration with Dynamic Mobile Infrastructure

Navigation in unknown environments has emerged as an increasingly pivotal area of research, with autonomous robots assuming repetitive or hazardous tasks that would be challenging for humans. The complexities intrinsic to space exploration highlight the imperative for autonomous systems to support astronauts in their missions. A key challenge in this domain revolves around the realisation of a positioning service analogous to Earth's Global Navigation Satellite System. Traditionally, a common approach involves deploying a static infrastructure of beacons or anchors strategically placed within the exploration area to support agent position computation. This paper presents an innovative solution, employing a swarm of mobile unmanned aerial vehicles that dynamically follow and assist ground entities and uses ranging only measurements. This approach effectively addresses the cooperative localisation problem, eliminating the reliance on GNSS systems and pre-deployed beacon infrastructure. Notably, this novel approach not only removes these dependencies but also extends its positioning service capabilities to an unlimited number of entities, representing a significant advancement in navigation solutions tailored for space exploration. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed positioning framework. Even in the most challenging scenarios, the mean error in the computed position by the ground entity remains within a maximum margin of 50 centimetres with common ranging uncertainties.