Visual navigation chip for planetary landers

This paper describes an image processing chip developed by the University of Dundee to support vision-based navigation of a planetary lander. The chip detects features in an image and tracks them from one image frame to the next. It manages the list of feature points and their status. Information about tracked feature points is sent to a Guidance and Navigation Control (GNC) computer for integration with information from the Inertial Measurement Unit. The connection to the GNC computer is via two SpaceWire links. A third SpaceWire link is used to control the camera providing images to the image processing chip