Enhanced monocular visual odometry integrated with laser distance meter for astronaut navigation

Area of Science:

• Robotics and Space Exploration
• Computer Vision
• Navigation Systems

Background:

• Monocular visual odometry (VO) offers compact navigation for astronauts but suffers from scale ambiguity.
• Stereo vision systems, while common in robotics, are often too bulky for wearable astronaut applications.
• Accurate position and orientation knowledge is crucial for astronaut Extravehicular Activities (EVAs).

Purpose of the Study:

• To address the scale ambiguity inherent in monocular VO for astronaut navigation.
• To develop a robust and compact navigation system for astronauts.
• To enable accurate global trajectory recovery using direct distance measurements.

Main Methods:

• Integration of a monocular camera with a laser distance meter (LDM).
• Development of a robust extrinsic calibration method between the camera and LDM.
• Implementation of a navigation scheme fusing LDM measurements with monocular visual odometry to correct scale drift.
• Detailed methodology for matching laser pointer projections across multiple frames.

Main Results:

• Successful recovery of global trajectory for monocular image sequences.
• Demonstrated correction of scale drift using fused distance measurements.
• Validation of the integrated system using a live dataset from a simulated lunar environment.
• Experimental results confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Conclusions:

• The proposed integration of monocular cameras and laser distance meters effectively solves the scale ambiguity problem in VO.
• This system provides a viable solution for accurate and compact wearable astronaut navigation.
• The method enables reliable global trajectory estimation, crucial for lunar exploration and other planetary missions.