HALO: Hazard-Aware Landing Optimization

HALO: Hazard-Aware Landing Optimization

Created
Aug 30, 2024 9:27 PM
Tags
Trajectory OptimizationPerceptionQuadcopter
Authors

Christopher Hayner, Samuel Buckner, Behçet Açıkmeşe (et. al.)

Date
May 30, 2023
Summary

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.

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Code

https://github.com/UW-ACL/HALO

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