A novel crater recognition based visual navigation approach for asteroid precise pin-point landing

This paper proposes a novel terrain-relative navigation (TRN) approach for the asteroid pin-point landing mission. The key concept is encapsulating efficient crater matching with active LiDAR ranging. Importantly, a novel crater to 3D crater model matching approach is proposed. Then, the line-of-sight from lander to crater is employed to guide the LiDAR ranging, and parameters of the matched 3D crater model is efficiently fused with LiDAR ranging to compensate its measurement, resulting in the robustness against the variation of terrain relief. In addition, a crater selection mechanism is proposed to reduce the estimation uncertainty. Monte Carlo simulation results show that the proposed approach is able to provide an adequate navigation performance under a high terrain relief, which is an evident improvement over the traditional methods.