Preliminary Design of the Dragonfly Navigation Filter

TL;DR

This paper presents the initial design of a navigation filter for the Dragonfly mission to Titan, integrating multiple sensors and advanced SLAM techniques to enable multi-kilometer surface flights.

Contribution

It introduces a novel navigation filter architecture combining lidar, visual odometry, pressure sensors, and IMUs, optimized for long-distance surface exploration on Titan.

Findings

Designed a multi-sensor fusion navigation filter

Developed methods for optimizing image baselines

Proposed efficient SLAM approximation techniques

Abstract

Dragonfly is scheduled to begin exploring Titan by 2034 using a series of multi-kilometer surface flights. This paper outlines the preliminary design of the navigation filter for the Dragonfly Mobility subsystem. The software architecture and filter formulation for lidar, visual odometry, pressure sensors, and redundant IMUs are described in detail. Special discussion is given to developments to achieve multi-kilometer surface flights, including optimizing sequential image baselines, modeling correlating image processing errors, and an efficient approximation to the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problem.