A Rule-Based Fuzzy Safety Index for Landing Site Risk Assessmen

Abstract

This paper presents a fuzzy rule-based safety index that quantifies the ease-of-landing a spacecraft on a planetary surface based on sensor-derived measurements of terrain characteristics. These characteristics include, but are not limited to, slope and roughness. The proposed representation of terrain safety incorporates an intuitive, linguistic approach for expressing terrain characteristics that is robust with respect to imprecision and uncertainty in the sensor measurements. The risk assessment methodology is tested and validated with a set of simulated data. These tests demonstrate the capability of the algorithm for perceiving hazards associated with landing on a planetary surface.