NASA’s Perseverance rover navigates Mars using an enhanced autonomous system called AutoNav, which “makes 3D maps of the terrain ahead, identifies hazards, and plans a route around any obstacles without additional direction from controllers back on Earth.” Crucially, as JPL engineer Vandi Verma put it, “the rover is thinking about the autonomous drive while its wheels are turning” - it plans as it moves rather than stopping to compute, the way earlier rovers did.
The payoff is speed. Perseverance can reach a top driving speed of about 393 feet (120 meters) per hour, compared with roughly 66 feet (20 meters) per hour for the Curiosity rover. With light-speed delay making real-time joystick driving from Earth impossible, on-board autonomy is what lets the rover cover ground efficiently between commands.