Design and Performance Assessment of Hazard Avoidance Techniques For Vision Based Landing

Hazard Avoidance is a key technology for a safe landing of future planetary missions. During Hazard Avoidance, sensors and computers onboard the lander are used to detect hazards in the landing zone, autonomously select the most suitable region for landing, and generate the trajectory that retargets the lander to the safer landing site. In this paper, vision-based hazard avoidance algorithms are briefly described, and the results of a consolidated performance assessment under a realistic simulated scenario representing a landing on Mercury are presented. Results show that the developed Hazard Avoidance algorithms are effective at detecting hazards and guiding the lander to a safe landing site.