Speaker
Description
GENEVIS presents full-software, Vision-Based Navigation (VBN) solutions for space rendez-vous and landing. Emphasis is put on the genericity of the algorithms, where the image processing techniques used to retrieve vehicle localization information are applicable to a wide range of environments. The proposed hybrid navigation filter that fuses inertial and (terrain or target-spacecraft) relative measurements is reconfigurable automatically and ensures the best navigation estimate is always provided for any sensor association selected as input.
Results on two representative scenarios are obtained: the close-range approach of a cooperative rendez-vous and a lunar landing. PIL and HIL tests are performed to further validate the solution for the landing scenario. Thanks to this successful demonstration, the solution has been pushed to PILOT, a European navigation solution on-board the Russian Luna-27 mission.
Extensive analysis and testing was performed in order to check that the selected processor (LEON-4) was adequate in terms of memory and data processing for the Space RTTB (Real-Time Test Bed, using simulated images. Additionally, a Flight RTTB was developed and embarked on a helicopter as flying platform for processing real images in a landing scenario. Enough margin was found and additional algorithms could be incorporated with further potential parallelization and synchronization of the different tasks. An extension of the original activity explored different HW architectures for pushing further the genericity of the disruptive VBN landing strategy.
