Autonomous Landing Manoeuvre by Landmark Tracking Technique

In this paper, a vision system for autonomous guidance of space probes during close approach to celestial bodies is proposed. The aim is to reconstruct the motion of a spacecraft from the information gathered with a single CCD camera. A minimum requirement during close approach is to have enough information about obstacles position and dimension, time to impact and relative motion transversal to the line of sight. Classical approaches, that derive kinematical quantities by optical flow computation, are too slow and require a remarkable computational effort. In this paper a novel procedure is presented that obtain required information, about the motion of a spacecraft, with a meaningful reduction in computation time and cost.