Newest papers

MARE: An Open-Source Lunar Rover Simulator with Shadow Ground Truth for Perception and Autonomy

Raúl Castilla-Arquillo, Miguel A. Olivares-Méndez · 2026 · arXiv (Cornell University)

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2610.28465 · cited by 0 works (OpenAlex) · open-access PDF

Korean

태양 태양 표면 탐구는 점점 더 극단적 인 조명 조건에서 비 구조화 된 지형을 감지하고 통과해야하는 자율 로버에 의존합니다. 달 극 근처에서 낮은 태양 상승은 스테레오 시각, 지형 분할 및 지역화에 도전하는 긴, 높은 대조 그림자를 생산합니다. 이러한 조건을위한 인식 및 탐색 알고리즘을 개발하는 것은 정확한 지상 진실로 큰 양의 센서 데이터를 필요로합니다. 현장 캠페인과 아날로그 시설은 높은 비용과 제한된 다양성을 제공 할 수 있습니다.이 논문은 MARE (모듈 자율성 및 렌더링 환경), 월 로버 인식 및 자율성을위한 오픈 소스 시뮬레이션 스위트, Unreal Engine 5 및 ROS 2

Machine translation (Meta M2M100); the English original follows.

Abstract

Lunar surface exploration increasingly relies on autonomous rovers that must perceive and traverse unstructured terrain under extreme illumination conditions. Near the lunar poles, low sun elevations produce long, high-contrast shadows that challenge stereo vision, terrain segmentation, and localization. Developing perception and navigation algorithms for these conditions requires large amounts of sensor data with accurate ground truth, which field campaigns and analog facilities can only provide at high cost and with limited variety. This paper presents MARE (Modular Autonomy and Rendering Environment), an open-source simulation suite for lunar rover perception and autonomy built on Unreal Engine 5 and ROS 2. MARE consists of three integrated components. Terrain Studio generates cratered and rocky lunar Digital Elevation Maps (DEMs) to build simulation scenes. A dedicated Unreal Engine project hosts two physics-based rovers with plugins for stereo, lidar, event, and Single-Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) cameras, streaming time-stamped sensor data and pixel-accurate ground truth. Lastly, a Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) stack provides web-based mission control. Validation shows a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.79 between predicted and rendered shadows at low sun elevations, and stereo depth analysis verifies decreased pixel coverage in shadowed regions relative to sunlit terrain.

Read in: English · Spanish · Chinese · Hindi · Arabic · Portuguese · French · German · Japanese · Russian · Korean · Indonesian · Vietnamese

Topics: Terrain, Rendering (computer graphics), Computer science, Traverse, Ground truth, Remote sensing

Sources: OpenAlex (CC0), arXiv, Crossref. Agent Exchange