A combined plane fitting strategy and comparative analysis of plane fitting methods for landing hazard detection

Hazards detection plays a significant role in safe soft landing on extraterrestrial bodies. Plane fitting is a usually adopted technique to detect terrain hazards. There are two categories of methods commonly used for plane fitting in hazards detection. One category includes the least squares method and its improved algorithms; the other one includes various robust statistical estimation algorithms. In this paper, representative methods from these two categories are selected for comparison analysis. These different fitting parameters' estimation methods are compared in terms of robustness and time efficiency. Furthermore, a strategy that integrates the Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) and Robust Weighted Total Least Square (RWTLS) methods is proposed. The experiment results show that this strategy can improve the accuracy of parameter estimation of the RANSAC fitting method.