Lunar Autonomy Challenge

With Stanford NAV Lab (Stanford University)

We are developing a full-stack autonomous agent for lunar rover navigation and mapping designed for the Lunar Autonomy Challenge competition, hosted by NASA and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). This challenge directly supports NASA’s Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative (LSII), which seeks to develop foundational technologies and approaches needed to fulfill the Artemis missions. The goal of the challenge is to virtually explore and map the lunar surface using a digital twin of NASA’s lunar In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Pilot Excavator (IPEx) robot. The challenge provides a high-fidelity lunar simulation environment based on Unreal Engine and built using CARLA (Dosovitskiy et al., 2017), which is capable of photorealistic imagery and simulating vehicle dynamics over complex terrain. By leveraging the unique and novel aspects of the Lunar Autonomy Challenge and its simulator, we not only develop solutions for robust SLAM and navigation, but also study the performance of various methods, as well as their interactions, in the lunar setting.

Related Publication: Full Stack Navigation, Mapping, and Planning for the Lunar Autonomy Challenge, ION GNSS, 2025