Digital Twin for Analog Mars Missions: Investigating Local Positioning Alternatives for GNSS-Denied Environments

Future planetary exploration missions will rely heavily on efficient human-robot interaction to ensure astronaut safety and maximize scientific return. In this context, digital twins offer a promising tool for planning, simulating, and optimizing extravehicular activities. This study presents the development and evaluation of a digital twin for the AMADEE-24 analog Mars mission, organized by the Austrian Space Forum and conducted in Armenia in March 2024. Alternative local positioning methods were evaluated to enhance the system's utility in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. The digital twin integrates telemetry from the Aouda space suit simulators, inertial measurement unit motion capture (IMU-MoCap), and sensor data from the Intuitive Rover Operation and Collecting Samples (iROCS) rover. All nine experiment runs were reconstructed successfully by the developed digital twin. A comparative analysis of localization methods found that Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)-based rover positioning and IMU-MoCap localization of the astronaut matched Global Positioning System (GPS) performance. Adaptive Cluster Detection showed significantly higher deviations compared to the previous GNSS alternatives. However, the IMU-MoCap method was limited by discontinuous segment-wise measurements, which required intermittent GPS recalibration. Despite these limitations, the results highlight the potential of alternative localization techniques for digital twin integration.