A. Liesch, P. Suwinski, B. Liu, V. Chernykh, K. Janschek

For the future exploration of our solar system, missions to Small Solar System Bodies (SSSBs), such as asteroids or comets, are a promising and scientifically important area. The current missions exploring SSSBs require extensive human monitoring and processing to ensure safe operations. By incorporating more onboard autonomy, spacecrafts can explore SSSBs more efficiently and increase scientific output. The Astrone project posed a novel concept of a low-altitude hovering vehicle directly on the surface of an SSSB. This paper presents the AI Mapping, as a part of the extension of the Astrone projects navigation concept with additional AI-based algorithms. The AI Mapping consists of two parts. First, an overview of the AI-based Light imaging, detection, and ranging (LiDAR)/Camera data fusion will be given. With this method, a resolution increase of low-resolution flash-LiDAR data by a factor 8x8 was achieved. Second, the obtained high-resolution data was used in addition to the corresponding wide-angle monocular 2D grayscale images of the irregular and unstructured surface of the SSSB to pre-identify possible landing sites. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based approach was trained and tested with our artificially generated data set. Different versions of the Deeplabv3 with certain ResNet and ResNet-RS backbone nets were compared. The results show that hazardous areas such as rocks, boulders, and craters on the surface could be detected successfully. With this method, it was possible to achieve an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 67.45 for the semantic segmentation task.

Deutscher Luft- und Raumfahrtkongress 2023, Stuttgart

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt - Lilienthal-Oberth e.V., Bonn, 2023

Conference Paper

englisch

21,0 x 29,7 cm, 9 Seiten

urn:nbn:de:101:1-2023102013201765405617

10.25967/610423

Artificial Intelligence, Guidance, Navigation and Control, Space Exploration

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Liesch, A.; Suwinski, P.; et al. (2023): AI-Based Mapping for Navigation on Significantly Unstructured Planetary Surfaces. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt - Lilienthal-Oberth e.V.. (Text). https://doi.org/10.25967/610423. urn:nbn:de:101:1-2023102013201765405617.

20.10.2023