MARE: An Open-Source Lunar Rover Simulator with Shadow Ground Truth for Perception and Autonomy
Lunar surface exploration increasingly relies on autonomous rovers that must perceive and traverse unstructured terrain under extreme illumination conditions.
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Key points
- Near the lunar poles, low sun elevations produce long, high-contrast shadows that challenge stereo vision, terrain segmentation, and localization.
- 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.
- 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.
Sources (1)
- [1]MARE: An Open-Source Lunar Rover Simulator with Shadow Ground Truth for Perception and AutonomyarXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 20, 04:18 PM
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.
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