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Fusion of Visible and Thermal-Infrared Imagery for SLAM for Landing on Icy MoonsThis paper addresses the problem of localization for landing on the surface of icy moons, like Europa or Enceladus. Due to the possibility of specular reflection as well as high bulk albedo, icy surfaces present new challenges that make traditional vision-based navigation systems relying on visible imagery unreliable. We propose augmenting visible light cameras with a thermal-infrared camera using inverse-depth parameterized monocular EKF-SLAM to address problems arising from the appearance of icy moons. Results were obtained from a novel procedural Europa surface simulation which models the appearance and the thermal properties simultaneously from physically-based methods. In this framework, we show that thermal features improve localization by 23% on average when compared to a visible camera. Moreover, fusing both sensing modalities increases the improvement in localization to 31% on average, compared to using a visible light camera alone.
Document ID
20190027478
Acquisition Source
Ames Research Center
Document Type
Technical Memorandum (TM)
External Source(s)
Authors
Gonzalez, M. Felicio
(Universidade de Lisboa Lisboa, Portugal)
Furlong, P. Michael
(Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies Inc. (SGT Inc.) Moffett Field, CA, United States)
Dille, Michael
(Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies Inc. (SGT Inc.) Moffett Field, CA, United States)
Wong, Uland Y.
(Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies Inc. (SGT Inc.) Moffett Field, CA, United States)
Date Acquired
July 18, 2019
Publication Date
February 1, 2019
Subject Category
Optics
Lunar And Planetary Science And Exploration
Report/Patent Number
NASA/TM-2019-220241
ARC-E-DAA-TN68167
Funding Number(s)
CONTRACT_GRANT: NNA14AA60C
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Public Use Permitted.
Keywords
thermal vision
state estimation
icy moons
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