The Vision Navigation Based On Lunar Surface Control Point Registration

Aimed at accomplishing lunar lander precise navigation task during the entry, descent and landing (EDL) phase, a lunar terrain registration based vision navigation method of lunar lander is proposed. During the descent phase of the lander, there exits large rotation and scale change between the images of lunar surface captured by a CCD camera mounted on the lander and the image database. The scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) method is used to select features of lunar terrain and match them in the image database, which overcomes the problem of matching images with large rotation and scale change. Finally, by using the geography information of the matched feature, absolute attitude and position in geography coordinates can be estimated by 2D/3D pose estimation. The results of simulation show that this vision navigation method is effective and can be used in the EDL navigation task.