Research On Key Technology For Mars UAV Control And Autonomous Navigation

With the development of human socio-economy and technology, more and more people from various countries pay more attention to deep-space exploration. The level of national space exploration technology has a direct impact on its international status. Mars is the closest planet where life is possible. So , Mars exploration is a hot issue in international deep space exploration in recent years. Mars UAV has the advantages that the other exploration methods do not have. It makes that Mars UAV exploration is becoming one of the development directions of deep space exploration .Some researches are done for Mars UAV in other countries, But , there is no news about the successful test flight of Mars UAV. The other documents about Mars UAV research have not been seen or been reported in China. In this paper, some research and discussion are done for the several key issues about Mars UAV.First, the overall mission of Mars UAV exploration and the feature of Mars environment surroundings are both described in this paper, The environmental differences between the Earth and Mars are compared ,and the impact on the researches for Mars UAV is analyzed. Based on the above, the longitudinal mathematical model of Mars UAV is established. And the related aerodynamic features of this model are also analyzed. These work will provide the platform for the follow-up research for Mars UAV navigation and control methods.Secondly, the feature of the whole process from extravehicular to level flight is researched. Based on the above model, two control methods for Mars UAV are proposed, one is a switching control method, the other is the method for pull-up control and level flight control . And then, a total energy control method is also proposed. Mars UAV control actions need navigation signals as the trigger signal of the effective implementation according to its task features. But, Mars UAV itself must have autonomous navigation capability. Therefore, computer vision technology is researched for autonomous navigation of Mars UAV in this paper. Scene matching and on-board data storage problem in visual navigation are researched, according to the features of Mars UAV exploration flight and the limitations of its on-board computer. Fast image feature extraction and matching algorithms for Mars UAV are proposed. Its On-board data storage mode is also proposed. Different methods are designed for different flight phases to reduce general performance requirements of its onboard computer, while achieving fast image matching of the whole Mars UAV exploration flight.Finally, the research work on the the above is summarized, and its shortcomings are also pointed out.Then,the further research proposals are given.