Planning views to model planetary pits under transient illumination

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of planning views for modeling large, local, substantially 3D terrain features at long range from surface rovers. These include building-size and stadium size pits with vertical walls. Pits have been identified in recent high-resolution images of the Moon and Mars. Planetary pits are interesting scientific targets created by collapse, often exposing layers of bare rock in their walls, hinting at past volcanism and other subsurface processes with their morphology. Some offer glimpses into caves. This paper presents a pipeline for view trajectory planning that enables detailed modeling of planetary pits from surface rovers. Techniques for converting prior terrain knowledge into a planning problem are developed, methods for planning rover images are discussed, and a comparison of different image-based reconstruction methods for pit modeling is presented. Results from preliminary field experiments for the end-to-end view trajectory planning pipeline are presented.