Vision Aided Inertial Navigation for Autonomous Pinpoint Planetary Landing

Autonomous landing spacecraft precisely to selected zone is rather important for planetary exploration. This paper describes a vision aided inertial navigation scheme to meet the requirement of autonomous pinpoint planetary landing. Landmarks and opportunistic features are detected and tracked autonomously to revise the error of inertial navigation. The image coordinates of landmarks and features derived from navigation camera and the measurements of inertial measurement unit are integrated with extended Kalman flter to estimate the pose of spacecraft and opportunistic features' position in inertial reference frame. Numeric simulation demonstrates the validity of the proposed navigation scheme.