Monocular Vision-Based Pose Estimation of Uncooperative Spacecraft

Activities in outer space have entered a new era of growth, fostering human development and improving key Earth-based applications such as remote sensing, navigation, and telecommunication. The recent creation of SpaceX's Starlink constellation as well as the steep increase in CubeSat launches are expected to revolutionize the way we use space...

Guidance, Navigation and Control for Active Debris Removal

To ensure long-term sustainable access to space, it is of paramount importance that humankind acts to alleviate the space debris problem in near vicinity of Earth. The most effective mitigation strategy for large debris items is provided by active debris removal missions, which remove one or more resident space objects from orbit. The execution...

Relative Navigation for Debris Removal (RENDER): Designing a Novel Fiducial Marker System

To mitigate the growth of space debris, it is vital that Active Debris Removal (ADR) is performed in the near future. Since ADR will require robust relative navigation, future spacecraft should be marked with fiducial markers that are robustly extracted from an image taken by a chaser spacecraft. To prevent the restriction of robotic movement...

Evaluation of tightly- and loosely-coupled approaches in CNN-based pose estimation systems for uncooperative spacecraft

The relative pose estimation of an inactive spacecraft by an active servicer spacecraft is a critical task in the design of current and planned space missions, due to its relevance for close-proximity operations, such as In-Orbit Servicing and Active Debris Removal. This paper introduces a novel framework to enable robust monocular pose...