Attitude and position determination based on craters for precision landing

Abstract

According to the problem of autonomous optical navigation, this paper presents an easy and high-precision algorithm to estimate the attitude and position of a lander by using at least three extracted marginal elliptic curves of craters. The geometric and algebraic constraints between the marginal elliptic curves of craters and its 2D images are derived, and then the linear equations about lander’s motion are established by using Kronecker product. Consequently, the laner’s attitude and position relative to targeted features are uniquely acquired from the linear equations. In particular, the algorithm is easy to carry out because all computations involved in this algorithm are linear matrix operations. The extensive experiments over simulated images and parameters demonstrate the robustness, accuracy and effectiveness of our method.

A Novel Approach to Visual Navigation based on Feature Line Correspondences for Precision Landing

“…From Figure 12, the conclusion can be drawn that the result of the simulation by using the EKF is clearly better than the previous solution and the visual navigation algorithm based on crater matching of Shao et al (2016). After the extended Kalman filtering, the lander's attitude errors are stable within 0·5 ° and the lander's position errors decrease with decreasing altitude to within 1 m at a height of about 247·9 m. This is because 2D images become sharper with the decreasing altitude of the lander.…”

“…More recently, algorithms based on a Stereo-Vision (SV) camera and IMU have been introduced to estimate a lander's pose respectively by two cameras or Digital Elevation Model (DEM) (Woicke and Mooij, 2018; Delaune et al, 2016). In addition, an algorithm based on crater matching was proposed to compute motion parameters by using Kronecker products (Shao et al, 2016).…”

Feature extraction algorithm of an irregular small celestial body in a weak light environment

“…Future small-body exploration missions will require more precise landing capabilities, including sample collection, return missions and landings at scientifically feasible locations. However, the precise landing of small celestial detectors is an enormous technical challenge ( Shao et al, 2016 ).…”