Open-source autonomous navigation for planetary rovers
A fork of Autoware, adapted for GPS-denied rough-terrain autonomy

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The Problem

Every autonomous planetary rover runs proprietary navigation code. University rover teams rebuild autonomy from scratch every year. Startups face years of development before their rover can navigate a rock field. There is no open-source equivalent of what Autoware did for self-driving cars — but for rovers on rough terrain.

What Regolith Does

Regolith takes the proven Autoware ROS 2 architecture — perception, planning, control — and replaces road-driving assumptions with planetary rover requirements:

Autoware (roads)	Regolith (rough terrain)
GPS + HD maps	Visual-inertial odometry, no GPS
Lane-following on pavement	Terrain-aware waypoint navigation
Traffic rules & signals	Hazard avoidance & traversability
Abundant compute (x86 server)	Resource-constrained embedded boards

The goal: clone the repo, build it, launch the simulation, and watch a rover autonomously navigate between waypoints across a rocky, sloped planetary landscape — no hardware required.

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    Mission Manager                       │
│              (waypoints, keep-out zones)                 │
└──────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────┘
                       │
        ┌──────────────┼──────────────────┐
        ▼              ▼                  ▼
┌──────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐
│ Localisation │ │  Navigation   │ │  Perception  │
│              │ │  & Planning   │ │              │
│ Visual odom  │ │ Global plan   │ │ Terrain map  │
│ IMU fusion   │ │ Local planner │ │ Obstacle det │
│ Wheel odom   │ │ Traj follower │ │ Traversab.   │
│ Fault detect │ │ Hazard avoid  │ │ Costmap gen  │
└──────┬───────┘ └──────┬────────┘ └──────┬───────┘
       │                │                  │
       └────────────────┼──────────────────┘
                        ▼
          ┌──────────────────────────┐
          │  Hardware Abstraction    │
          │  Layer (HAL)             │
          │                          │
          │  Sensor interfaces       │
          │  Actuator interfaces     │
          │  Rover kinematics        │
          └──────────┬───────────────┘
                     ▼
          ┌──────────────────────────┐
          │  Your Rover / Simulator  │
          │  (Gazebo, ISAAC Sim,     │
          │   Leo Rover, Husky, ...) │
          └──────────────────────────┘

Project Status

**🚧 Early development

Regolith is in active early development. The current milestone focuses on:

1. ROS 2 Hardware Abstraction Layer — sensor/actuator interfaces and rover kinematics
2. Localisation & Navigation pipeline — GPS-denied pose estimation + waypoint traversal, validated in simulation
3. Planetary simulation environment — Gazebo worlds with rocks, slopes, and realistic lighting for benchmarking

See the Roadmap below for details.

Quick Start

Coming soon — the first simulation release is targeted for mid-2026. When ready:

# Clone
git clone https://github.com/Regolith-Project/regolith.git
cd regolith

# Build (ROS 2 Humble/Jazzy)
colcon build --symlink-install

# Launch simulation
ros2 launch regolith_bringup simulation.launch.py

This will spawn a rover in a planetary-analogue Gazebo world and begin autonomous waypoint navigation.

Roadmap

Current Milestone (NLnet NGI Zero Commons Fund)

Phase	Focus	Target
WP1	Autoware fork, architecture, HAL interfaces	Architecture doc + interface packages
WP2	GPS-denied localisation (VIO + IMU + wheel odom fusion)	<5% drift over 500 m traverse
WP3	Terrain-aware navigation + obstacle avoidance	Autonomous 5-waypoint route in simulation
WP4	Gazebo planetary simulation environment + benchmarks	Turnkey sim with rocks, slopes, shadows
WP5	Documentation + community bootstrap	Clone → build → run in under 1 hour

Future Vision

• 🔬 Advanced perception — HDR stereo vision, lidar processing for extreme lighting
• 🏔️ Terrain classification — ML-based surface detection (rock, sand, dust, bedrock)
• ⚡ Adaptive speed governor — look-ahead risk-aware speed control
• 🤖 Hardware validation — Leo Rover, Clearpath Husky, custom platforms
• 🏜️ Field demos — ESA Mars Yards, planetary analogue sites
• 🛰️ Space-grade hardening — ECSS alignment, FPGA offload, real-time determinism

Built On

Regolith stands on the shoulders of excellent open-source projects:

• Autoware — the autonomous driving stack we fork from
• ROS 2 — robotics middleware
• Gazebo — simulation
• Nav2 — ROS 2 navigation framework
• NVIDIA ISAAC Sim — high-fidelity simulation (planned)

Who Is This For?

• 🎓 University rover teams — stop rewriting navigation every year. Start from a working stack.
• 🏢 Space industry — a shared benchmark and reference implementation for ESA/Terrae Novae rover programmes.
• 🔧 ROS 2 developers — standard packages that work with your existing tf2, sensor_msgs, Nav2 setup.
• 🔬 Researchers — a reproducible simulation testbed for rough-terrain autonomy research.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Whether you're fixing a typo, adding a sensor driver, improving the planner, or building a new simulation world — we'd love your help.

About

Regolith is developed by Astro42 (Wozify Engineering Group Kft), a Budapest-based European space software consultancy with an ESA track record. Project funding is pending.

License

Regolith is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

Copyright 2026 Wozify Engineering Group Kft (t/a Astro42)

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0