VISION NAVIGATION FOR EUROPEAN LANDERS AND THE NPAL PROJECT

As a passive system with a natural adaptation capacity to the environment, mimicking the human capacity for detecting hazards, vision-navigation has been the subject of a sustained research effort for more than ten years. The ESA NPAL project represents a major maturity step in this effort, aiming at a proof of concept, with an elegant breadboard realisation, preparing for the next step to flight demonstration. The major technological challenges addressed within NPAL are the search for compactness, a design for robustness against high dynamics, and eventually a demonstration of the reliability of the navigation system against unknown and varied scenes and terrains scenarios.