Robust visual odometry for space exploration : 12 th symposium on advanced space technologies in robotics and automation

As part of the ESA X-ROB study 1 , a Visual Odometry (VO) based localisation component was selected for evaluation and bread-boarding as part of a GNC solution for the European Ground Prototype (EGP). Existing ExoMars Rover, EGP and Sample Fetch Rover (SFR) requirements served as a baseline for VO evaluation. The solution is based on the Oxford Visual Odometry (OVO)[1] kernel, with provision for further performance improvements fusing additional sensor data. The extensive test results show that it satisfies the critical reference requirements with a high level of performance, and additionally meets performance goals on flightrepresentative hardware.