Lidar-Based Hazard Avoidance for Safe Landing on Mars

Johnson, Andrew; Klumpp, Allan R.; Collier, James B.; Wolf, Aron A.

doi:10.2514/2.4988

Cited by 139 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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Section: Unprepared Landing Sitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many methods have been proposed for the assessment of 3D surface geometry from active range sensors [23,27,40,47]. Johnson et al [27] propose a hazard map estimation framework using estimates of surface slope and roughness from laser scanner range measurements. Similarly, Howard and Seraji [23] develop a fuzzy logic approach for the classification of terrain into landable and hazardous segments, based on measurements of slope, approach and roughness obtained with least-squares plane fitting applied to LIDAR range data.…”

Section: Unprepared Landing Sitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Real-time landing place assessment in man-made environments

Sun

Christoudias

Lepetit

et al. 2013

Machine Vision and Applications

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We propose a novel approach to real-time landing site detection and assessment in unconstrained man-made environments using passive sensors. Because this task must be performed in a few seconds or less, existing methods are often limited to simple local intensity and edge variation cues. By contrast, we show how to efficiently take into account the potential sites' global shape, which is a critical cue in man-made scenes. Our method relies on a new segmentation algorithm and shape regularity measure to look for polygonal regions in video sequences. In this way we enforce both temporal consistency and geometric regularity, resulting in very reliable and consistent detections. We demonstrate our approach for the detection of landable sites such as rural fields, building rooftops and runways from color and infrared monocular sequences significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art.

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Section: Unprepared Landing Sitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Unprepared Landing Sitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-time landing place assessment in man-made environments

Sun

Christoudias

Lepetit

et al. 2013

Machine Vision and Applications

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“…For example, future rovers will require better than 1 km landing accuracy for Mars and better than 30 m for the Moon. Laser radar or lidar technology can be key to meeting these objectives because it can provide high-resolution three-dimensional maps of the terrain, accurate ground proximity and velocity measurements, and it can determine atmospheric pressure and wind velocity in the case of Mars landing [9][10][11]. These lidar capabilities can enable the landers of the future to identify the preselected landing zone and hazardous terrain features within it, determine the optimum flight path, and accurately navigate using precision ground proximity and velocity data.…”

Section: Planetary Landing Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Role of Lidar Technology in Future NASA Space Missions

Amzajerdian

2008

MRS Proc.

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The past success of lidar instruments in space combined with potentials of laser remote sensing techniques in improving measurements traditionally performed by other instrument technologies and in enabling new measurements have expanded the role of lidar technology in future NASA missions. Compared with passive optical and active radar/microwave instruments, lidar systems produce substantially more accurate and precise data without reliance on natural light sources and with much greater spatial resolution. NASA pursues lidar technology not only as science instruments, providing atmospherics and surface topography data of Earth and other solar system bodies, but also as viable guidance and navigation sensors for space vehicles. This paper summarizes the current NASA lidar missions and describes the lidar systems being considered for deployment in space in the near future.

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“…It happens frequently that the terrain conditions of these area are more complicated, this not only poses a great challenge to the spacecraft Guidance, Navigation, & Control Systems, but also requests more higher demand to the performance of landing obstacle detection and the efficiency of the landing site selection. Up to now, using multiple sensors data for hazard detection have been proposed (Brady et al, 2009;Neveu et al, 2015), including passive optical image data (Bajracharya, 2002;Cheng et al, 2001;Cohanim et al, 2013;Huertas et al, 2006;Mahmood and Saaj, 2015;Matthies et al, 2008;Woicke and Mooij, 2016;Yan et al, 2013), LiDAR data (Amzajerdian et al, 2013;Chakroborty et al, 2009;de Lafontaine et al, 2006;Johnson et al, 2002) and Radar data (Pollard et al, 2003), and so forth.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulation Experiment on Landing Site Selection Using a Simple Geometric Approach

Zhao

Tong

Xie

et al. 2017

Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.

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ABSTRACT:Safe landing is an important part of the planetary exploration mission. Even fine scale terrain hazards (such as rocks, small craters, steep slopes, which would not be accurately detected from orbital reconnaissance) could also pose a serious risk on planetary lander or rover and scientific instruments on-board it. In this paper, a simple geometric approach on planetary landing hazard detection and safe landing site selection is proposed. In order to achieve full implementation of this algorithm, two easy-to-compute metrics are presented for extracting the terrain slope and roughness information. Unlike conventional methods which must do the robust plane fitting and elevation interpolation for DEM generation, in this work, hazards is identified through the processing directly on LiDAR point cloud. For safe landing site selection, a Generalized Voronoi Diagram is constructed. Based on the idea of maximum empty circle, the safest landing site can be determined. In this algorithm, hazards are treated as general polygons, without special simplification (e.g. regarding hazards as discrete circles or ellipses). So using the aforementioned method to process hazards is more conforming to the real planetary exploration scenario. For validating the approach mentioned above, a simulated planetary terrain model was constructed using volcanic ash with rocks in indoor environment. A commercial laser scanner mounted on a rail was used to scan the terrain surface at different hanging positions. The results demonstrate that fairly hazard detection capability and reasonable site selection was obtained compared with conventional method, yet less computational time and less memory usage was consumed. Hence, it is a feasible candidate approach for future precision landing selection on planetary surface.

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Lidar-Based Hazard Avoidance for Safe Landing on Mars

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 139 publications

References 5 publications

Real-time landing place assessment in man-made environments

Real-time landing place assessment in man-made environments

Role of Lidar Technology in Future NASA Space Missions

Simulation Experiment on Landing Site Selection Using a Simple Geometric Approach

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