Visual-based location for lunar rover in sandy environment
Mingheng Zhang · Dalian Ligong Daxue xuebao · 2011
Visual odometry is an important sensor for lunar rover,which can realize vehicle location and slip check in soft lunar surface.A visual odometry algorithm with high adaptability to sandy simulated lunar surface is developed.Firstly,morphology-based image enhancement method is studied to guarantee enough corners been extracted.Secondly,corner matching is implemented under epipolar restriction and the efficiency of corner matching and tracking is enhanced by optimizing the search window size and estimated search direction.Thirdly,random sample consensus(RANSAC) algorithm is proposed to compute and update rover pose to the 6 degree of freedom.Finally,experiments under a simulated lunar surface have confirmed the stability and positioning accuracy of the proposed method,even while driving in an environment of scarce features.