Using UAVs for Future Mission on Mars

Abstract

In the past years, rovers, landers, and orbiters played a fundamental role in the frame of planetary exploration on the Moon and on Mars. Today, considering Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become a promising challenge in future scientific missions. Particularly, the successful land on Mars in 2021 of the NASA helicopter “Ingenuity” and its successful flights on the Martian surface open the door to a new way of exploring Mars by overcoming the limitations of unmanned ground vehicles. Indeed, UAVs represent efficient alternatives for in-deep monitoring of the surface of Mars, also allowing for the collection of detailed image data while navigating in both close and wide areas. These aspects are not always feasible when using surface vehicles, as they constantly deal with ground obstacles that in turn cause the vehicle to move at a slow pace, thus limiting the ground crossing and the line of sight. On the other hand, orbiters always provided aerial images of Mars, but with insufficient spatial resolution when compared to the data collected by drones. Therefore, when operating on Mars, the drone must be able to perform fully autonomous navigation tasks to efficiently explore and map the surrounding area. In the presented research, a general trade-off between multiple rotorcraft architectures is presented and, after the design choice of the hexacopter configuration, the hardware is modeled using both 3D CAD Solidworks and Blender 3.1 tools. Then, to simulate the autonomous navigation task, a preliminary analysis is performed together with the validation of the path planning method and the 2D and 3D mapping algorithms using the Robot Operating System (ROS) and the Gazebo tool. The hexacopter functionalities along with the navigation sensors are then simulated and tested in a Mars-looking environment for developing comprehensive navigation approaches for future exploration of Mars.