Visual Monocular Localization, Mapping, and Motion Estimation of a Rotating Small Celestial Body

Abstract

In the exploration of a small celestial body, it is important to estimate the position and attitude of the spacecraft, as well as the geometric properties of the target celestial body. In this paper, we propose a method to concurrently estimate these quantities in a highly automatic manner when measurements from an attitude sensor, inertial sensors, and a monocular camera are given. The proposed method is based on the incremental optimization technique, which works with models for sensor fusion, and a tailored initialization scheme developed to compensate for the absence of range sensors. Moreover, we discuss the challenges in developing a fully automatic navigation framework.^*

^* This paper is an extended version of a preliminary conference report [1].