Processing 3D flash LADAR point-clouds in real-time for flight applications

Craig, Ronald A.; Gravseth, Ian; Earhart, R. Patrick; Bladt, Jeff; Barnhill, S.; Ruppert, Lyle; Centamore, C.

doi:10.1117/12.720143

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Two examples are the structured light camera [15] and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) systems [16,17]. Both systems produce range data to a solid surface that can be used to determine local hazards and slopes.…”

Section: B Spacecraft Landing Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Overview of Ball Flash LIDAR and Related Technology Development

Rohrschneider

Masciarelli

Miller

et al. 2013

AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) Conference

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Ball Aerospace has been developing Flash LIDAR systems for more than 7 years, and space qualified their first system on the Sensor Test for Orion Relative-navigation Risk Mitigation (STORRM) mission in May of 2011 on STS-134. The STORRM unit demonstrated the capabilities of the flash LIDAR system for relative navigation, but other applications exist, including science applications, and landing risk mitigation on Earth and other planets. This paper provides an overview of flash LIDAR sensor systems, describes the applications and scenarios where they provide advantages over scanning systems, and provides an overview of related technology development efforts at Ball Aerospace. The current development efforts include relative navigation applications, 6-DOF relative pose determination, landing hazard detection, electronic laser beam steering, and sensor upgrades that include electronic architecture modifications.

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Section: B Spacecraft Landing Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Overview of Ball Flash LIDAR and Related Technology Development

Rohrschneider

Masciarelli

Miller

et al. 2013

AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) Conference

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“…The computing hardware was based on an IBM Blade server cluster that was rack mounted for the Jigsaw project. A ladar data processing system for a single-pulse sampling system was demonstrated by Craig et al for autonomous-rendezvous-and-docking as well as hazard-detection-and-avoidance using FPGA [1]. Pose of a docking ring was determined in real-time by imaging a set of reflective tapes that were strategically placed onto this docking ring for guidance and navigation purposes.…”

Section: Previous Work On Real-time Data Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A flash ladar system can determine the pose and location of a fast moving object by essentially freezing the object in its trajectory at the instant of a single laser flash. This instantaneous 3D imaging capability makes a flash ladar camera the system of choice for rendezvous proximity operations, autonomous docking, and autonomous navigation [1,2]. In all these applications, it is critical for a system to remove any spurious data points and to provide corrected 3D data points for estimating the relative orientation and location between the sensor itself and the target in real-time.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-time 3D flash ladar imaging through GPU data processing

et al. 2011

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We present real-time 3D image processing of flash ladar data using our recently developed GPU parallel processing kernels. Our laboratory and airborne experiences with flash ladar focal planes have shown that per laser flash, typically only a small fraction of the pixels on the focal plane array actually produces a meaningful range signal. Therefore, to optimize overall data processing speed, the large quantity of uninformative data are filtered out and removed from the data stream prior to the mathematically intensive point cloud transformation processing. This front-end pre-processing, which largely consists of control flow instructions, is specific to the particular type of flash ladar focal plane array being used and is performed by the computer's CPU. The valid signals along with their corresponding inertial and navigation metadata are then transferred to a GPU device to perform range-correction, geo-location, and ortho-rectification on each 3D data point so that data from multiple frames can be properly tiled together either to create a wide-area map or to reconstruct an object from multiple look angles. GPU parallel processing kernels were developed using OpenCL. Postprocessing to perform fine registration between data frames via complex iterative steps also benefits greatly from this type of high-performance computing. The performance improvements obtained using GPU processing to create corrected 3D images and for frame-to-frame fine-registration are presented.

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“…This capability is largely independent of platform and target motion/jitter and lighting conditions [9]. So the processing the point cloud data in real time is the most critical.…”

Section: Key Technology Of Terrain-following Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

A special terrain-following system based on flash LIDAR

Hai-yang

Liu

2012

2012 IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation

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Tight control or compensation of terrain and flight height is an important search area in airborne gravimetry and gradiometry surveys. A special terrain-following system based on flash LIDAR is presented. In order to keep constant height flight, the front propagation and Binary approach algorithm based on range information are employed to discriminate vegetation, buildings and so on from the bare earth. Since the gravity gradient signal falls off rapidly (1/R 3 ) as a function of distance from the source, the method can eliminate the survey errors induced by terrain and flight height to some degree.

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Processing 3D flash LADAR point-clouds in real-time for flight applications

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

An Overview of Ball Flash LIDAR and Related Technology Development

An Overview of Ball Flash LIDAR and Related Technology Development

Real-time 3D flash ladar imaging through GPU data processing

A special terrain-following system based on flash LIDAR

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