A Self-Contained Localization Unit for Terrestrial Applications and Its Use in Space Environments

Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) have been introduced on earth as standard localization services in many domains allowing a wide range of applications. Unfortunately, extraterrestrial exploration missions do not benefit from these developments, nor do indoor environments on earth. We developed a general concept for solving the localization problem in unstructured environments. Firstly, this concept was applied to the forestry domain on earth and general purpose software modules were implemented. Secondly, these modules were reused on a mobile robot in a planetary exploration scenario. Based on the application-independent localization concept we built a mobile self-contained localization unit equipped with several sensors and a processing unit allowing precise estimation of its pose in different domains.