Progresses and prospects of environment perception and navigation for deep space exploration rovers

Environment perception and navigation are the core technologies for automated driving of deep space exploration rovers. Due to the special circumstances of the deep space environment, the rover's environment perception and navigation are particularly challenging comparing to the corresponding technologies in autonomous car driving on Earth. The paper presents a review of the progresses of environment perception, rover localization and path planning, from engineering application and scientific research perspectives. Moreover, the future prospects of intelligent environment perception and long-range rover navigation are discussed.