The resurgence of interest in landing on the Moon has sparked the creation of a number of novel technologies concerning Terrain-Relative Navigation (TRN) algorithms. They aid in the need for increasingly precise landing, as well as ensuring fully autonomous operations. To achieve
...
The resurgence of interest in landing on the Moon has sparked the creation of a number of novel technologies concerning Terrain-Relative Navigation (TRN) algorithms. They aid in the need for increasingly precise landing, as well as ensuring fully autonomous operations. To achieve this, most technologies use a ubiquitous feature present on the Moon: impact craters. This research describes the design, development, and testing of an end-to-end TRN system demonstrator that utilises a novel region-based Crater Detection Algorithm (CDA) based on Ellipse R-CNN together with a projective invariant-based crater pattern matching technique that allows for robust ego-position estimation. The system was tested using physically accurate camera views of the Lunar surface. The development of this demonstrator yielded three additions to the field of TRN: a flexible data generation pipeline, a novel AI-based CDA, and results of a novel region-based model in tandem with a modern crater pattern matching technique.