Safe and Fuel-Efficient Motion Planning for Lunar Propulsive Drones

Key points

• In future lunar missions, propulsive drones will complete a series of hops across the lunar surface while capturing images with downward-facing cameras.1
• We present an autonomous motion planning framework that uses a vision-guided optimal control strategy for performing safe, efficient hops between specified waypoints.1
• To evaluate the validity of potential landing sites, we develop a custom semantic segmentation model for identifying obstacles from aerial images, and we introduce an approach for rapidly calculating reachable terrain.1
• We test the optimal hop planner in a high-fidelity lunar simulation environment.1

Sources (1)

• [1]Safe and Fuel-Efficient Motion Planning for Lunar Propulsive Drones
  arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 15, 05:05 PM

  Propulsive drones are a promising new technology for generating high-resolution terrain models of the Moon.

  In future lunar missions, propulsive drones will complete a series of hops across the lunar surface while capturing images with downward-facing cameras.

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