Datasets and Benchmarking of a path planning pipeline for planetary rovers

Abstract

We present datasets of 2.5D elevation maps of planetary environment that were collected on Mt. Etna during the space-analogous ARCHES mission [1]. In addition to the raw elevation maps, we provide cost maps that encode the traversibility of the terrain. We demonstrate how these cost maps are used during our development of mapping and planning algorithms for ground based robots in the context of the planetary rover navigation. More specifically, we use the benchmarking pipeline to evaluate the parameters and choice of methods that are used for the 2.5D cost map generation, which in turn affects the path planning behavior. Finally, we showcase how the provided maps can be supplied as a test environment in Bench-MR, which is a framework for benchmarking of motion planning algorithms for wheeled robots.