NaRPA: Navigation and Rendering Pipeline for Astronautics
This addresses the need for accurate simulation tools for space-based visual navigation and guidance, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ray-tracing and rendering techniques.
The paper introduces NaRPA, a ray-tracing-based graphics engine for simulating light transport in space-borne imaging, which generates images, point clouds, and depth maps to aid in designing and testing visual navigation algorithms, with demonstrations including stereo imagery and differentiable rendering for attitude estimation.
This paper presents Navigation and Rendering Pipeline for Astronautics (NaRPA) - a novel ray-tracing-based computer graphics engine to model and simulate light transport for space-borne imaging. NaRPA incorporates lighting models with attention to atmospheric and shading effects for the synthesis of space-to-space and ground-to-space virtual observations. In addition to image rendering, the engine also possesses point cloud, depth, and contour map generation capabilities to simulate passive and active vision-based sensors and to facilitate the designing, testing, or verification of visual navigation algorithms. Physically based rendering capabilities of NaRPA and the efficacy of the proposed rendering algorithm are demonstrated using applications in representative space-based environments. A key demonstration includes NaRPA as a tool for generating stereo imagery and application in 3D coordinate estimation using triangulation. Another prominent application of NaRPA includes a novel differentiable rendering approach for image-based attitude estimation is proposed to highlight the efficacy of the NaRPA engine for simulating vision-based navigation and guidance operations.