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

Future Mars missions will require rover autonomy that can operate across unstructured terrain, changing illumination, atmospheric dust, and limited communication. Simulation is a practical way to study these conditions before deployment, but existing Mars-relevant resources differ in scope, including mission-oriented simulators, fixed analog datasets, task-specific environments, and open robotics interfaces. In this context, we present MarsLab, an open-source, ROS2-native Mars rover simulator for autonomy and navigation algorithm development. MarsLab combines HiRISE-derived and procedural terrain with customizable rock, crater, solar-illumination, and atmospheric-dust settings, and runs a Perseverance-class rover model in NVIDIA Isaac Sim. The runtime publishes RGB, depth, RGB-D point clouds, LiDAR, IMU, wheel odometry, and Ground Truth (GT) pose data through standard ROS2 topics. We demonstrate MarsLab with Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) benchmarks across sensing modalities, dust levels, scene geometry, and route length, and with Visual Place Recognition (VPR) benchmarks over repeated Mars Base traversals under illumination and dust changes. The results illustrate how controlled scene variation and shared GT trajectories can be used to compare trajectory-level estimation and image-level place recognition within the same simulator. Our Project Page: https://kimhoyun-robotair.github.io/MarsLab/.

Accurate perception of lunar surfaces is critical for modern lunar exploration missions. However, developing robust learning-based perception systems is hindered by the lack of datasets that provide both geometric and photometric supervision. Existing lunar datasets typically lack either geometric ground truth, photometric realism, illumination diversity, or large-scale coverage. In this paper, we introduce MoonAnything, a unified benchmark built on real lunar topography with physically-based rendering, providing the first comprehensive geometric and photometric supervision under diverse illumination with large scale. The benchmark comprises two complementary sub-datasets : i) LunarGeo provides stereo images with corresponding dense depth maps and camera calibration enabling 3D reconstruction and pose estimation; ii) LunarPhoto provides photorealistic images using a spatially-varying BRDF model, along with multi-illumination renderings under real solar configurations, enabling reflectance estimation and illumination-robust perception. Together, these datasets offer over 130K samples with comprehensive supervision. Beyond lunar applications, MoonAnything offers a unique setting and challenging testbed for algorithms under low-textured, high-contrast conditions and applies to other airless celestial bodies and could generalize beyond. We establish baselines using state-of-the-art methods and release the complete dataset along with generation tools to support community extension: https://github.com/clementinegrethen/MoonAnything.

Future lunar missions will require autonomous rovers capable of traversing tens of kilometers across challenging terrain while maintaining accurate localization and producing globally consistent maps. However, the absence of global positioning systems, extreme illumination, and low-texture regolith make long-range navigation on the Moon particularly difficult, as visual-inertial odometry pipelines accumulate drift over extended traverses. To address this challenge, we present a stereo visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system that integrates learned feature detection and matching with global constraints from digital elevation models (DEMs). Our front-end employs learning-based feature extraction and matching to achieve robustness to illumination extremes and repetitive terrain, while the back-end incorporates DEM-derived height and surface-normal factors into a pose graph, providing absolute surface constraints that mitigate long-term drift. We validate our approach using both simulated lunar traverse data generated in Unreal Engine and real Moon/Mars analog data collected from Mt. Etna. Results demonstrate that DEM anchoring consistently reduces absolute trajectory error compared to baseline SLAM methods, lowering drift in long-range navigation even in repetitive or visually aliased terrain.