NaRPA: Navigation and Rendering Pipeline for Astronautics

arXiv:2211.01566v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents the applications of scientific ray-tracing in modeling and simulating light transport for space-borne image data generation. A ray-tracing engine, the Navigation and Rendering Pipeline for Astronautics (NaRPA), is introduced as a rendering framework to generate virtual datasets and support simulations for robust navigation pipelines. Sensor and environment models that enable the synthesis of space-to-space and ground-to-space virtual observations are presented. The work demonstrates the capabilities of simulating passive and active vision-based sensors using NaRPA to facilitate the design, testing, and verification of aerospace visual navigation algorithms. Additionally, the paper describes a velocimeter LiDAR model and its statistical validation with experimental data.