The aim of this study was to determine the effects that soft tissue motion has on ground reaction forces, joint torques and joint reaction forces in drop landings. To this end a four body-segment wobbling mass model was developed to reproduce the vertical ground reaction force curve for the first 100 ms of landing. Particular attention was paid to the passive impact phase, while selecting most ...

Landing mission concepts that are being developed for exploration of solar system bodies are increasingly ambitious in their implementations and objectives. Most of these missions require accurate position and velocity data during their descent phase in order to ensure safe, soft landing at the pre-designated sites. Data from the vehicle’s Inertial Measurement Unit will not be sufficient due to...

The examples in Figure 16 and Figure 17 demonstrate how system errors have a cascading effect, resulting in multiple errors being introduced into a single hypothesis string. The alignment examples shown are, by design, easy to understand and are easily derived. In practice, multiple errors frequently occur in a single hypothesis string resulting in many different possible alignments. The Scorin...

To increase the science return of future missions toMars and to enable sample return missions, the accuracy with which a lander can be delivered to the Martian surface must be improved by orders of magnitude. The prior work developed a convex-optimization-based minimum-fuel powered-descent guidance algorithm. In this paper, this convex-optimization-based approach is extended to handle the casew...

This paper describes the flight testing and evaluation of technologies for the autonomous landing of a Yamaha RMAX helicopter at non-cooperative sites without the aid of GPS. The Yamaha RMAX used for these flight trials has been modified to include stereo cameras, a scanning laser, and an avionics payload. Machine vision stereo range mapping is used to generate an accurate terrain representatio...

Demands for planetary landing Unmanned exploratory missions to e.g. Mars involve a landing phase, where the spacecraft descends vertically to the planetary surface. In order to minimize the impact during landing a breaking system of parachutes and airbags is employed. This system is uncontrolled and hence not able to adapt to unforeseeable situations. Indeed, landing spacecraft may easily hit a...