Navigation

 

Knowing where you are in a GNSS-denied, high-latency environment is a prerequisite for everything else. Our navigation research addresses this from two complementary angles. For planetary rovers we develop full Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) architectures that combine stereo visual odometry, hazard detection, and adaptive SLAM into a two-level stack: a lightweight low-level loop for efficient baseline traversal, and a heavier upper-level loop that activates on difficult terrain to fuse orbital context and reduce absolute drift. This architecture has been validated on ESA's ExoTeR rover and contributed to ESA's ExoMars GNC design studies. For orbital applications, the same principles translate to 6-DoF relative pose estimation for rendezvous with cooperative and non-cooperative spacecraft and for the overall inspection and maintenance of space structures. 

KEY CAPABILITIES
Two-level GNC architecture Efficient low-level navigation always active; adaptive SLAM upper-level triggers on difficult terrain or mission-critical phases.	Visual odometry & SLAM Stereo-vision-based VO with scan-matching SLAM; reduces absolute drift by correlating local maps to orbital DEM references.
Hazard detection & local replanning Real-time obstacle detection feeds a local path re-planner, allowing the rover to navigate without step-by-step ground uplinks.	Relative navigation in orbit 6-DoF pose estimation from fused RGB, depth, and thermal for approach and proximity operations on uncooperative targets.

 

IN THE LAB & IN THE FIELD

 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
01	Fast Vision in the Dark: A Case for Single-Photon Imaging in Planetary Navigation Rodríguez-Martínez, D. and del Pulgar, C.J. 18th Symposium on Advanced Space Technologies in Robotics and Automation (ASTRA), Leiden, The Netherlands (2025)
02	Field Assessment of Force Torque Sensors for Planetary Rover Navigation Gerdes L., Pérez-del-Pulgar C., Castilla-Arquillo R., Azkarate M. Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, 111(4), p. 122 (2025)
03	BASEPROD: The Bardenas Semi-Desert Planetary Rover Dataset Gerdes, L., Wiese, T., Castilla Arquillo, R., Bielenberg, L., Azkarate, M., Leblond, H., Wilting, F., Ortega Cortés, J., Bernal, A., Palanco, S. and Pérez del Pulgar, C. Scientific Data, 11(1), 1054 (2024).
04	SLAM for Autonomous Planetary Rovers with Global Localization Geromichalos D., Azkarate M., Tsardoulias E., Gerdes L., Petrou L., Pérez-del-Pulgar C. Journal of Field Robotics,  37(5), 830-847 (2020)
05	A GNC Architecture for Planetary Rovers with Autonomous Navigation Capabilities Azkarate M., Gerdes L., Joudrier L., Pérez-del-Pulgar C.J. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 3003–3009 (2020)
06	Improving Autonomous Rover Guidance in Round-Trip Missions Using a Dynamic Cost Map Paz-Delgado G.J., Azkarate M., Sánchez-Ibáñez J.R., Pérez-del-Pulgar C.J., Gerdes L., García-Cerezo A.J. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 7014–7019 (2020).
07	Efficient Autonomous Navigation for Planetary Rovers with Limited Resources Gerdes L., Azkarate, M., Sánchez-Ibáñez, R., Joudrier L., Pérez-del-Pulgar C.J., et al. Journal of Field Robotics, 37(7), 1153-1170 (2020)

 

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