Place revisiting for planetary rovers: An enabling technology and field testing of three mission concepts

Planetary rovers to date have been operated mainly in a serial mode; they are driven from one place to the next, away from the lander, and seldom return to previously visited places. We have been developing a visual navigation technique, called network of reusable paths (NRP), that can be thought of as a low-computational-cost version of simultaneous localization and mapping coupled to a path-tracking controller. The result is that a rover can be returned accurately to any place it has previously visited using only visual feedback; this enables science to be gathered from multiple sites in parallel. We will describe how NRP works, and present field test results of two mission concepts where we have made use of this technology: a lunar-sample-return scenario and a Mars-methane-hunting scenario.