Performance Evaluation of Navigation Schemes for Autonomous Exploration of a Secondary Explorer Rover in a Martian Lava Cave

Habitation in mars is one of the most ambitious goals of the 21st century as our permanent habitat, the earth is slowly losing its habitation qualities due to different disasters, pollution and rise of temperature. But there include several major challenges before we can make mars a habitable planet. Radiation, dusty storms, meteorites etc. makes the Martian surface one of the difficult places to live. The caves in the mars can be a viable solution to this problem as they can give protection against these threats. Lava caves are of particular interest in these case as these caves is similar to the lava caves found on earth. This research presents the design and performance evaluation of an autonomous secondary explorer rover in lava tubes of Mars. 3D & 2D mapping was done in a simulated environment and the performance of various path planning algorithms was evaluated in the lava cave. The experiment results show global path planners, especially A* can perform well if the entrance and exit are well defined while local path planners need human interventions several times even though they can avoid sudden dangers or landscape change inside the cave.