ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

The 2018 ExoMars mission will be ESA’s first rover mission to another planet. The mission objectives and physical form of the rover present particular development challenges and opportunities that are different from those encountered on a conventional satellite GNC system. This paper presents an overview of some of the notable differences that EADS Astrium has encountered during the development of the GNC system for the rover vehicle so far. The paper begins by giving a brief overview of the design of the ExoMars rover’s GNC system. It then describes some of the significant differences between the dynamics of a rover and the dynamics of a satellite, and discusses how these differences impact upon plant modelling, control techniques and data fusion. It then discusses how the design of the rover’s data handling system and the numerical simulation environment are influenced by the rover’s closed loop usage of images of the Martian terrain. Finally the opportunities presented by the ability to construct a fully functional breadboard rover are described.