ELOPE: A new Kelvins challenge has landed!

ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team (ACT), together with the University of Adelaide and TU Delft, is launching a new competition on the Kelvins platform: the Event-based Lunar OPtical-flow Egomotion estimation (ELOPE) challenge, that will start on May 20th, 2025.

The goal of the challenge is to estimate the trajectory of a lunar lander during descent, using only data from an event-based camera. There are no images, no GPS, and no prior knowledge of the landing site — just raw asynchronous events collected during simulated descents on a region of the Moon’s South Pole.

Participants are invited to reconstruct the missing pose information using this data. The problem combines aspects of estimation, computer vision, and space robotics, and is designed to explore the potential of event-based sensing for space applications.

Submissions are scored automatically on the platform, and participation is free.

More details — including the dataset, problem description, and a starter-kit — will be available on the Kelvins website when the challenge opens.

The challenge is open to anyone with an interest in event-based vision, estimation algorithms, or lunar exploration scenarios.