Simulation-based Assessment of Marker Placement for Point Cloud Acquisition using a Lunar Survey Rove
Tomoki Sugihara(a*), Rikako Shigefuji(a), Masafumi Nakagawa(a), Masanori Takigawa(b), Keitaro Kitamura(b), Taizo Kobayashi(c)

a) Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan
*ah20086[at]shibaura-it.ac.jp
b) Asia Air Survey Co., Ltd., Japan
c) Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Abstract

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) has been promoting a project to develop innovative unmanned construction technologies for use on the lunar surface. Unmanned surveying and remote construction technologies are essential for ground surveying in the initial phase of a lunar base construction project. However, due to the extreme temperature changes and space radiation in the lunar environment make conducting, conventional surveying using a total station difficult. Moreover, conventional Simultaneous Localization and Mapping using LiDAR (LiDAR-SLAM) is suitable for 3D measurement in a non-GNSS environment. However, the LiDAR-SLAM is not suitable for lunar surfaces due to the regolith^s poor geometric features. Therefore, we proposed a methodology to use spherical markers as landmarks with LiDAR-SLAM to improve the self-position estimation performance. However, the design of the marker placement has not yet been discussed. Therefore, we conducted an experiment on spherical marker arrangement for LiDAR-SLAM to evaluate its relative accuracy. In this study, we evaluated the validity of the marker placement and simulated the reduction in the number of markers by using data acquired in a lunar surface simulation field and a robot simulator that reconstructed the experimental field. We acquired point clouds of the lunar surface simulation field is acquired using LiDAR mounted on the prototype rover. In addition, we selected Webots as a robot simulator. Through our experiments, we applied a multivariate analysis to quantitative variables, such as the relative distance and angle between the spherical markers and the LiDAR. We also, proposed a methodology to evaluate marker placement planning.

Keywords: LiDAR-SLAM, robot simulator, unmanned surveying

Topic: Topic C: Emerging Technologies in Remote Sensing