  Slip detection is of fundamental importance for the safety and efficiency of
rovers driving on the surface of extraterrestrial bodies. Current planetary
rover slip detection systems rely on visual perception on the assumption that
sufficient visual features can be acquired in the environment. However,
visual-based methods are prone to suffer in perceptually degraded planetary
environments with dominant low terrain features such as regolith, glacial
terrain, salt-evaporites, and poor lighting conditions such as dark caves and
permanently shadowed regions. Relying only on visual sensors for slip detection
also requires additional computational power and reduces the rover traversal
rate. This paper answers the question of how to detect wheel slippage of a
planetary rover without depending on visual perception. In this respect, we
propose a slip detection system that obtains its information from a
proprioceptive localization framework that is capable of providing reliable,
continuous, and computationally efficient state estimation over hundreds of
meters. This is accomplished by using zero velocity update, zero angular rate
update, and non-holonomic constraints as pseudo-measurement updates on an
inertial navigation system framework. The proposed method is evaluated on
actual hardware and field-tested in a planetary-analog environment. The method
achieves greater than 92% slip detection accuracy for distances around 150 m
using only an IMU and wheel encoders.
