Feature-based Optical Navigation for Lunar Landings

Master thesis (2018)

Authors

A.B. Magalhães Oliveira Aerospace Engineering

Contributors

E. Mooij (supervisor 1)
Hans Krüger (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Aerospace Engineering
Copyright: © 2018 Beatriz Magalhães Oliveira
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

30-05-2018

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Aerospace Engineering

Abstract

For space exploration, reducing the size of landing ellipses, increases the access to areas of scientific interest. This can be achieved with improved GNC systems. Since the exclusive use of IMUs is insufficient for Pinpoint Landing, optical navigation is being explored as a solution.

The method developed in this work is based on image features matched between a pre-built database and the landing images captured in real-time. The algorithm was tested with data from DLR's TRON laboratory, namely images of a terrain model representative of the lunar surface and the associated ground-truth.

Provided sufficient image area, the navigation solution averaged around 1% of the Line Of Sight (LOS) distance and had a maximum value of around 3% of the LOS distance (apart from clear outliers).