Traversing Mars: Cooperative Informative Path Planning to Efficiently Navigate Unknown Scenes

This repository will contain the code for our informative path planning (IPP) framework allowing a mobile scout (e.g. an MAV) to explore the cost-optimal path of a follower robot (e.g. a rover) to a goal location in unknown environments. (Visuals: NASA/JPL)

This project was supported by the ETH Research Grant AvalMapper ETH-10 20-1 and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Table of Contents

Credits

• Paper
• Video

Note The code will be released here shortly.

Setup

• Installation
• Datasets

Examples

• Running an experiment

Paper

If you find this useful for your research, please consider citing our paper:

• F. M. Rockenbauer, J. Lim, M. G. Müller, R. Siegwart and L. Schmid, "Traversing Mars: Cooperative Informative Path Planning to Efficiently Navigate Unknown Scenes" in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 1776-1783, Feb. 2025, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2024.3513036 [ IEEE ] [ ArXiv ]

  @ARTICLE{10783051,
    author={Rockenbauer, Friedrich M. and Lim, Jaeyoung and Müller, Marcus G. and Siegwart, Roland and Schmid, Lukas},
    journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters}, 
    title={Traversing Mars: Cooperative Informative Path Planning to Efficiently Navigate Unknown Scenes}, 
    year={2025},
    volume={10},
    number={2},
    pages={1776-1783},
    keywords={Robots;Costs;Space exploration;Path planning;Navigation;Planning;Mobile robots;Green products;Wheels;Uncertainty;View planning for SLAM;path planning for multiple mobile robots or agents;space robotics and automation},
    doi={10.1109/LRA.2024.3513036}
    }