A navigation simulation system of lunar rover

This paper presents a navigation simulation system on lunar rover. With virtual reality technology, this system serves to verify the kinematics model and the validity of the planning-path for navigating lunar rover. Because the lunar terrain can not be treated as the 2D surface, the kinematics modeling of lunar rover unlike ordinary mobile robots needs to contain the information about terrain. This model assumes that the point of wheel-terrain point changes continuously. However, the terrain geometry and discretization in simulation do not meet this assumption so that error will destroy the simulation effect. An optimization strategy is proposed to eliminate this error and keeps tight contact between the wheels and the terrain. Finally, experiments validate the optimization method and the whole simulation system.