Christopher Hayner, Samuel Buckner, Behçet Açıkmeşe (et. al.)
HALO presents a combined perception (HALSS) and trajectory planning (Adaptive-DDTO) solution towards contingency planning for landing maneuvers with multiple candidate landing sites.
Abstract
With autonomous aerial vehicles enacting safety-critical missions, such as the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars, the tasks of automatically identifying and reasoning about potentially hazardous landing sites is paramount. This paper presents a coupled perception-planning solution which addresses the hazard detection, optimal landing trajectory generation, and contingency planning challenges encountered when landing in uncertain environments. Specifically, we develop and combine two novel algorithms, Hazard-Aware Landing Site Selection (HALSS) and Adaptive DeferredDecision Trajectory Optimization (Adaptive-DDTO), to address the perception and planning challenges, respectively. The HALSS framework processes point cloud information to identify feasible safe landing zones, while Adaptive-DDTO is a multi-target contingency planner that adaptively replans as new perception information is received. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach using a simulated Martian environment and show that our coupled perceptionplanning method achieves greater landing success whilst being more fuel efficient compared to a nonadaptive DDTO approach.