  There has been an increase in interest in missions that drive significantly
longer distances per day than what has currently been performed. Further, some
of these proposed missions require autonomous driving and absolute localization
in darkness. For example, the Endurance A mission proposes to drive 1200km of
its total traverse at night. The lack of natural light available during such
missions limits what can be used as visual landmarks and the range at which
landmarks can be observed. In order for planetary rovers to traverse long
ranges, onboard absolute localization is critical to the ability of the rover
to maintain its planned trajectory and avoid known hazardous regions.
Currently, to accomplish absolute localization, a ground in the loop (GITL)
operation is performed wherein a human operator matches local maps or images
from onboard with orbital images and maps. This GITL operation limits the
distance that can be driven in a day to a few hundred meters, which is the
distance that the rover can maintain acceptable localization error via relative
methods. Previous work has shown that using craters as landmarks is a promising
approach for performing absolute localization on the moon during the day. In
this work we present a method of absolute localization that utilizes craters as
landmarks and matches detected crater edges on the surface with known craters
in orbital maps. We focus on a localization method based on a perception system
which has an external illuminator and a stereo camera. We evaluate (1) both
monocular and stereo based surface crater edge detection techniques, (2)
methods of scoring the crater edge matches for optimal localization, and (3)
localization performance on simulated Lunar surface imagery at night. We
demonstrate that this technique shows promise for maintaining absolute
localization error of less than 10m required for most planetary rover missions.
