Virtual lunar landscapes for testing vision-guided lunar landers

Virtual reality techniques are being used to support the development of unmanned space probes intended to land on other planets in the solar system. These planetary landers will operate autonomously during landing and will use vision for navigation and guidance down to a safe landing spot. Suitable vision techniques have been developed but must be extensively tested on realistic test surfaces. A system (LunarSim) for producing realistic simulations of heavily cratered planetary surfaces has been developed to support exhaustive testing of vision guidance software. The paper begins by describing the reasons for developing a realistic simulation of the lunar surface. The techniques that have been used to produce models of impact craters are then described. A description of the LunarSim software is provided and an example is presented of an image sequence produced using LunarSim. Finally a summary of related current and future work is given.