Future Mars Rotorcrafts require advanced navigation capabilities to enable all terrain access for science investigations with long distance flights that are executed fully autonomously. A critical component is the ability to safely land in hazardous terrain as part of a mission, or triggered by an emergency situation. In this paper, we present an advanced navigation system for continuous on-board terrain reconstruction for the purpose of hazard-free landing site detection for the autonomous navigation of a Mars Science Helicopter - a JPL research concept that investigates the feasibility of flying a multi-kilogram science payload at various Mars science locations, with flight ranges of multiple kilometers per flight. Our approach builds on a visionbased perception system that incorporates an on-board visualinertial state estimator augmented by a laser altimeter (range- VIO), and a structure-from-motion 3D reconstruction approach that uses a single, downward-looking camera to provide dense depth measurements while the vehicle is in motion. Depth measurements are accumulated in a local, robot-centric, multiresolution elevation map that is analyzed by a landing site detector to extract safe landing areas below the rotorcraft, based on a heuristic that includes slope, roughness and the presence of landing hazards. Detected landing sites are prioritized by an on-board autonomy engine that either selects suitable landing sites for immediate landing maneuvers, or can explore a terrain location as part of a mission in order to find a best landing site in a pre-planned area. We demonstrate and evaluate our approach on simulated data and data acquired with a surrogate unmanned aerial system (UAS) executing flights over relevant terrain.


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Autonomous Safe Landing Site Detection for a FutureMars Science Helicopter


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2021-03-06


    Type of media :

    Preprint


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English



    Autonomous Safe Landing Site Detection for a Future Mars Science Helicopter

    Tzanetos, Theodore / Kubiak, Gerik / Domnik, Matthias et al. | NTRS | 2021


    Autonomous Safe Landing Site Detection for a Future Mars Science Helicopter

    Brockers, Roland / Delaune, Jeff / Proenca, Pedro et al. | IEEE | 2021


    Perception for Safe Autonomous Helicopter Flight and Landing

    Cover, Hugh / Kaess, Michael / Hemann, Garrett et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2016



    The research and independent on autonomous safe landing for unmanned helicopter

    Zhang, Guifeng / Bian, Daliang / Zhang, Wei et al. | IEEE | 2017