Rapid modeling of high resolution moon-like terrain models for testing of optical localization methods

This paper presents an intuitive approach for the rapid generation of arbitrary high resolution Digital Elevation Models (DEM) of moon-like surfaces, with minimal required extra expertise. It combines manual terrain shaping in a soil bin with automatic generation of 3 mm resolution DEMs. The generated DEMs are upscaled to 0.3 m resolution and integrated into lower-resolution DEMs of the lunar surface. The resulting model is used in the DLR project ATON (Autonomous Terrain based Optical Navigation) to realistically simulate optical sensors deployed on a lunar lander, enabling simulation of a complete landing trajectory until touch down. Results for five different landing site DEMs are provided to demonstrate the flexibility in modeling.