Hazard detection and landing site selection for planetary exploration using LIDAR

This paper presents an original approach for hazard detection and landing site selection, exploiting LIDAR measurements, to be used in the framework of autonomous planetary exploration scenarios. The proposed algorithm is designed aiming to reduce the computational effort typically required to process highly dense LIDAR point cloud data for the generation of a hazard map. In this respect, the proposed logic consists in selecting the safest landing region by diving the hazard detection process in two phases. First, a coarse hazard map is generated to discard most of the dangerous regions of terrain from the selection process. Second, a fine hazard map is generated over the safe areas to identify the best landing spot. The level of hazard is measured taking the local surface slope, height, and roughness into account. Preliminary performance assessment of the proposed technique is carried out using point clouds acquired imaging a mockup of the Lunar terrain with the RVS3000-3D
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scanning LIDAR (developed by Jena Optronik GmbH). In addition, the algorithm is tested processing a high-density terrestrial DEM, available through the Open Topography website, to evaluate its performance against a realistic landing terrain scenario.