AMAZE: Analog Mars Autonomous Zone Exploration

Future human exploration on Mars will undoubtedly greatly advance exploration of the Red Planet. However, any performed EVA unavoidably imposes a risk to the mission, equipment, and most importantly, to the person(s). Robotic platforms start to support humans to improve the safety, efficiency, and scientific output of EVAs.

The successful flights of the Mars Helicopter Scout (Ingenuity) in 2021, as part of the Perseverance rover mission to Mars, started the era of airborne robotic surface exploration on other planets. With the participation in AMADEE-20, the AMAZE project focused on the feasibility and development of a fully autonomous navigation pipeline for next-generation visual-inertial odometry frameworks. Aiming at providing a GNSS-independent power-on-and-go aerial platform for zone exploration, AMAZE gathered valuable insights on the requirements and feasibility of such systems. As a result within the mission phase, in-field system adaptations and changes were performed to create a successful autonomous flight.

Originally designed to be a data-driven testbench for JPL’s Mars Helicopter’s navigation and estimation algorithms, AMAZE  was intended to record sensor data in a Mars-like environment. Overall the experiment collected data from 14 sensors in over 50 flights with recordings of various ground conditions, terrain structures, cliff flight overs, and consecutive science close-ups including the survey of crater walls. Together with a unique ground-truthing setup for millimeter and sub-degree pose information using a dual RTK GPS, the recorded data provides immensely valuable information for future evaluation and design of 3D crater wall reconstruction, visual-inertial odometry, and autonomous navigation algorithms. The acquired insights already helped to improve our current frameworks and will result in several, novel, and state-of-the-art scientific publications.