An effective obstacle detecting method for soft landing on the moon

The autonomous obstacle detection and avoidance technology based on the lunar surface images is crucial for the lunar probe to achieve a safe landing on the moon surface. This article has discussed how to use the real-time data of the lunar surface images to judge whether it is safe or not to land on the scheduled landing site, and proposed an effective method for obstacle detecting and identifying: Firstly, the moon surface images are captured by the Light Detection and Ranging; then, the acquired three-dimensional images are processed in grayness to translate the graying processed images into a digital elevation matrix; finally, the digital elevation matrix is translated into an elevation 0 - 1 matrix by use of such data processing methods as getting the critical variance from matrix displacement and judging the danger coefficient, and the best position of touchdown point can be determined by the safe spiral searching algorithm. The simulation experiment result of the soft landing of Chang´E-3 has shown that this obstacle detecting method can effectively find the best touchdown point.