Autonomous navigation for the Martian Inspection Drone

Abstract

The interest of science community towards planet Mars has progressively increased in past decades. Rovers are already doing an excellent job in exploring the Martian surface environment and showed that the Red Planet is not suited for life. However, there is a possibility of enabling human exploration by having astronauts take shelter in habitats located within lava tubes, which can provide protection against radiation and dust storms. These tubes are extremely hard to explore with rovers, thus a flying vehicle will be more suitable for such tasks. INGENUITY (Martian helicopter) had already demonstrated that it is possible to fly on Mars by doing small and simple manoeuvres. Based on NASA's design, this article will introduce the development of guidance, navigation, and control operations of a Martian Inspection Drone (MID) that will be capable of finding the lava tube and scan it in real time using a RealSense camera. Linux based system was chosen in the development process, which allow ROS catkin workspace to connect ArduPilot and Gazebo. The navigation is accomplished using a combination of an inertial measurement unit, a camera, and a laser rangefinder. The flight computer runs an optical flow algorithm for control and navigation purpose. Also, a convolutional neural network is used to perform lava tube entrance detection and inspection.