50 years of rovers for planetary exploration: A retrospective review for future directions

This paper contributes an extensive review of the history from the former robotics to the present providing a particular emphasis on innovative technical contents of robotic exploration vehicles. To this end, a comprehensive study with a representative collection of 100 mobile robots along the history was performed for which a robot’s statistical profile was obtained considering aspects such as weight, size, number of wheels, and speed of movement. In addition, an exhaustive bibliometric analysis has been conducted over 8120 contributions between 1963 and 2015. The study on the scientific literature found that, thought mobile robotics is a research field being displaced by other disciplines of higher scientific return (e.g., humanoid robots, unmanned aircraft systems or intelligent autonomous vehicles), it is nevertheless confirmed the continuity of mobile robotics with the aim of developing advanced science at the expense of forthcoming space exploration missions. Therefore, this paper attempts to address what is the current state-of-the-art and what are the future challenges set in mobile robotics.