Fast vision-based localization for a mars airplane

Kentaro Arai, Hidemasa Takamura, Hiroka Inoue, Masahiro Ono, Shuichi Adachi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Mars airplane is one of the candidate payloads of JAXA's next Mars exploration program. Airborne observation of Mars is expected to fill the 'gap' between rovers, which provides a detailed observation but a limited area of coverage, and orbiters, which can cover a wide range of area but with a limited resolution. Two key challenges to realize a Mars airplane are 1) unavailability of GPS for localization and 2) limited computing power due to tight restriction on the mass of on-board instrument. We address these issues by developing a computationally tractable vision-based navigation algorithm. Our approach is based on an efficient feature detector and descriptor, Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB), combined with the information from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) using the extended Kalman filter (EKF) method. In this paper, we demonstrate the proposed ORB/EKF-based localization method by indoor experiments, using a small quadrotor helicopter and Mars surface image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The experimental results indicate that the computational cost of the proposed method is sufficiently small for real-time processing.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the SICE Annual Conference
PublisherSociety of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE)
Pages1449-1455
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9784907764463
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2014 Oct 23
Event2014 53rd Annual Conference of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers of Japan, SICE 2014 - Sapporo, Japan
Duration: 2014 Sept 92014 Sept 12

Publication series

NameProceedings of the SICE Annual Conference

Other

Other2014 53rd Annual Conference of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers of Japan, SICE 2014
Country/TerritoryJapan
CitySapporo
Period14/9/914/9/12

Keywords

  • Mars airplane
  • Terrain relative navigation
  • extended Kalman filter

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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