Autonomous hazard detection and landing point selecting for planetary landing

Autonomous hazard avoidance is a key technology for planetary pinpoint landing. In this paper, passive image based hazard detection and landing point selecting methods are presented. Craters on planetary surface are detected by edge detection, edge matching and geometry fitting. Rocks are another familiar terrain feature on planetary surface and it are detected by variance map segmentation. For landing point selecting, fuzzy rules are researched to reasoning the hazard detection result and any other landing constraints, the output of fuzzy reasoning engine is fed into a landing point searching algorithm to return the best landing point. Simulation results will be given to show that the proposed hazard detection and landing point selecting methods are simple and effective.