Abstract: Considering the mission environment, through drawing lessons from international research experience, the sensor configuration of autonomous navigation of mars rover is given, and the autonomous navigation and path planning techniques which can be used in aerospace engineering are investigated in this paper. According to the requirement of autonomous navigation and riding for rover on mars, the involved techniques are deeply researched, such as DEM(Digital Elevation Model) construction and obstacle detection, global path planning, video odometer based on stereo vision, pose determination based on multi-sensor fusion as well as local path planning. A set of experimental system was established, and the simulation experiment was carried in laboratory. The relative research results can offer some basis for the researches of autonomous navigation system for succeeding mars rover.