Terrain relative navigation can improve the precision of a spacecraft’s state estimate by providing supplementary measurements to correct for drift in an inertial measurement unit. This paper presents a crater detector, LunaNet, that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) and image processing methods to detect craters from camera imagery taken by a spacecraft’s onboard camera. These detections are matched with known lunar craters, and these matches are used as visual landmark measurements in an extended Kalman filter (EKF). Our results show that, on average, LunaNet detects approximately twice the number of craters in an intensity image as two prior intensity-image-based crater detectors, and detects more accurate craters than the other two detectors as well. One of the challenges of using cameras for this task is that they can generate imagery with significant variations in image quality and noise levels. LunaNet is robust to four common types of image noise due to its incorporation of a CNN that is trained on diverse data. LunaNet also produces crater detections with better image persistence over a trajectory. These qualities contribute to a LunaNet-based EKF that results in consistently lower state estimation error and that outperforms the filters based on the other detectors.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Neural Network Approach to Crater Detection for Lunar Terrain Relative Navigation


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2021-07-01




    Type of media :

    Conference paper , Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    DEEP LEARNING CRATER DETECTION FOR LUNAR TERRAIN RELATIVE NAVIGATION

    Downes, Lena / Steiner, Ted J. / How, Jonathan P. | TIBKAT | 2020


    Deep Learning Crater Detection for Lunar Terrain Relative Navigation

    Downes, Lena / Steiner, Ted J. / How, Jonathan P. | AIAA | 2020


    Comparison of Crater-Detection Algorithms for Terrain-Relative Navigation

    Woicke, Svenja / Moreno Gonzalez, Andres / El- Hajj, Isabelle et al. | AIAA | 2018


    Comparison of Crater-Detection Algorithms for Terrain-Relative Navigation (AIAA 2018-1601)

    Woicke, Svenja / Gonzalez, Andres Moreno / Hajj, Isabelle El- et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2018


    Terrain Relative Navigation Using Crater Identification in Surface Topography Data

    Rohrschneider, R. / American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; Conferderation of European Aerospace Societies | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2011