Planetary surface landing area selection based on single image and closed environment avoidance

For avoiding the lander landing on the flat areas in a closed environment in the process of soft landing on asteroid, a landing area selection method based on a single image is proposed. Firstly, the proposed method of binary is applied to extract hazards, and the skeleton of areas with no hazards is extracted. Secondly, take the intersection points with three lines of the skeleton as the center of landing circles. Finally, the best landing circle can be obtained by the scoring method with the help of radius, connection among circles, circle's texture characters, and the cluster feature of circle's center with all the hazards. Compared with other methods the proposed landing area selection method is highlighted with fewer obstacles, and can avoid landing on the place in a closed environment. © 2015, Chinese Institute of Electronics. All right reserved.