Autonomous Navigation for Binary Asteroid Landing: A vision-based and altimeter-aided navigation filter for small spacecraft

This paper investigates the performance of an autonomous navigation system to navigate a spacecraft in the proximity of a binary asteroid system using optical and laser ranging measurements. The knowledge about the binary asteroid is limited to its orbital parameters and ellipsoid shape models. The accelerometer bias random walk is included in...

On line-of-sight navigation for deep-space applications: A performance analysis

Line-of-Sight (LoS) navigation is an optical navigation technique that exploits the direction to visible celestial bodies, obtained from an onboard imaging system, to estimate the position and velocity of a spacecraft. The directions are fed to an estimation filter, where they are matched with the actual position of the observed bodies,...

Indoor swarm exploration with Pocket Drones

Pocket drones, weighing less than 50 grams, are small, agile and inherently safe. This makes them suitable for several surveillance tasks such as search and rescue, green-house monitoring and pipe-line inspection. In order for a more efficient search, a swarm of pocket drones would be ideal to explore these types of areas faster. Current methods...