Integrating PSR Traverse Plans With Sound-Derived Geometry

VIPER's 100-day, 37-kilometer traverse included four PSR excursions. Integrating passive acoustic geometry into PSR route planning replaces light-dependent imaging with sound-derived priors, keeping battery-only rovers on safe routes through shadowed pit rims.

A Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover concept simulation at a lunar-analog test site near Mauna Kea hit a wall at the edge of a simulated permanently shadowed region. The route planner depended on visual terrain classification up to the shadow line, then fell back to low-confidence hazard maps inside the PSR. When the rover sim was told to enter the dark zone on a battery-only excursion, the planner refused to commit to a specific path because it had no geometry information beyond the shadow boundary. Meanwhile, passive acoustic recordings from a scouting traverse had captured echo-geometry data for roughly 40 meters past the shadow line, but no interface existed to feed that geometry into the traverse planner.