On the treatment of soft soil parameter uncertainties in planetary rover mobility simulations

•Computer model for rover mobility simulation.•Bevameter tests for assessing uncertainties of soil parameters in the model.•Uncertainty propagation by employing probabilistic and non-probabilistic procedures.•Probabilistic Bayesian approach gives best results.

Nowadays soft soil–wheel contact models are widely used for predicting the mobility of rovers in off-road applications. However, most of the contact models used in computer simulations are based on semi-empirical laws for which soil parameters can be assessed only with large uncertainty. This lack of knowledge results in significant uncertainty on the rover position predictions. Applied to a planetary rover model, this paper illustrates probabilistic and non-probabilistic techniques for efficient treatment of soil parameter uncertainty for rover position predictions.