An Attitude and Position Determination Algorithm of Lander Based on Craters for Precision Landing

As for the problem of autonomous optical navigation, this paper presents an easy and high-precision algorithm to estimate the attitude and position of a lander by using at least three extracted marginal elliptic curves of craters. Firstly, the geometric and algebraic constraints between the marginal elliptic curves of craters and its 2D images are derived, then the linear equations about the lander's motion are established by using Kronecker product. With this method, the attitude and position of a lander can be uniquely determined. In particular, the algorithm is easy to use and more flexible because all computations involved in this algorithm are linear matrix operations. The extensive experiments over simulated images and parameters demonstrate the robustness, accuracy and effectiveness of our method.