Optimal crater landmark selection based on optical navigation performance factors for planetary landing

Planetary craters are natural navigation landmarks that widely exist and are easily observed. Optical navigation based on crater landmarks has become an important autonomous navigation method for planetary landing. Due to the increase in observed crater landmarks and the limitation of onboard computation, the selection of good crater landmarks has gradually become a research hotspot in the field of landmark-based optical navigation. This paper designs a fast crater landmark selection method, which not only considers the configuration observability of crater subsets but also focuses on the influence on navigation performance arising from the measurement uncertainty and the matching confidence of craters, which is different from other landmark selection methods. The factor of measurement uncertainty, which is anisotropic, correlated and nonidentically distributed, is quantified and integrated into selection based on crater pairing detection and localization error evaluation. In addition, the concept of the crater matching confidence factor is introduced, which reflects the possibility of 2D projection measurements corresponding to 3D positions. Combined with the configuration observability factor, the crater landmark selection indicator is formed. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by Monte Carlo simulations.