Speaker
Description
Low-thrust, long-period asteroid deflection strategies have become a primary focus in planetary defense research. In such strategies, autonomous cooperative navigation for multi-spacecraft landing has been recognized as one of the critical technologies to achieve precise spacecraft deployment on the asteroid surface. However, existing spacecraft autonomous navigation methods based on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) are primarily focused on global surface mapping, resulting in high computational costs. Moreover, due to the sparsity of features, single-spacecraft SLAM exhibits significant mapping errors, which exacerbate local mapping inaccuracies. To meet the requirements of local mapping at landing sites and precise navigation in deflection missions, this paper introduces a novel EKF-SLAM-based cooperative navigation method for multi-spacecraft by incorporating inter-spacecraft relative positioning information into the EKF-SLAM framework. This approach enables accurate local mapping of landing sites and high-precision cooperative navigation while reducing computational costs. The observability of the proposed navigation method is analyzed to confirm its feasibility and effectiveness. Finally, using existing asteroid datasets as a case study, a two-spacecraft landing navigation scenario was simulated, and the performance of the proposed method was compared to that of the conventional single-spacecraft SLAM method, thereby yielding significant improvements in navigation accuracy.