Advancement of Geometric Methods for Active Terrain Relative Navigation

Building off the first year’s progress to enhance NASA’s precision landing capabilities with active terrain relative navigation (ATRN); the primary objective of the year 2 effort is to develop a deployable software library capable of performing absolute and relative localization as well as successively stitching digital elevation maps to create a high-resolution map of the observed terrain. The flight software application will be validated with a high-fidelity HWIL planetary lander simulation and real LiDAR data obtained by the SPLICE project’s helicopter test flight campaign.

Beginning with Artemis 4; both SpaceX and Blue Origin teams have a requirement to land within 50m of the targeted landing site under any lighting conditions. ATRN is an unfunded focus area in the landing precision development; evolution & infusion roadmap coupled with a severe lack of research associated with rotationally and scale invariant 3D feature identification and correspondence algorithms. Anticipated benefits: Flight-ready software application capable of performing relative and absolute localization with precision on the order of ~1-10m

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