3 ms·
The latest UAVs also use ToF LIDAR and SLAM for GPS-rejected navigation / inertial dead reckoning correction. I'm not sure that would work well on Mars either,
by bri3d 2y ago
The latest UAVs also use ToF LIDAR and SLAM for GPS-rejected navigation / inertial dead reckoning correction. I'm not sure that would work well on Mars either, though, as the environment might be too featureless for that approach also.
I think the best approach would probably be to equip the "base station" / lander with an RF beacon. Ideally, you could drop some RF beacons throughout the environment as you went, but even a single beacon with some directional receivers on the drone should work pretty well (here, the featureless environment becomes a benefit as you have to contend much less with radio reflections).
- tonyarkles 2y agoSLAM is likely exactly what they were doing on Mars (it falls apart if there’s no image features to register against on the ground) and ToF lidar works great for vertical position and velocity but doesn’t help much for horizontal position or velocity if there isn’t much terrain variability for the lidar to reflect off of nearby. 100% agree on the RF beacons. You might not even need the directional antennas. Using things like RSSI might be enough to augment the local sensors. Alternatively having a digitally-controlled phased array could probably result in quite excellent positioning.
- bri3d 2y ago> SLAM is likely exactly what they were doing on Mars I think the system on Ingenuity just used feature detection based 2D optical flow rather than a more full-scale 3D environment-reconstruction type SLAM setup. Which is fine since neither would work in a blank environment like that.
- tonyarkles 2y agoAh yeah that’s true. I’d forgotten about that step in the middle. I suppose too… very valuable lesson learned there for the team: you’ll need to come up with something to augment the optical nav system in that environment!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]