Motion prediction of tumbling uncooperative spacecraft during proximity operations

Abstract

The relative attitude estimation between chasers and uncooperative targets is an important prerequisite for executing in orbit service (OOS) tasks. Only by efficiently obtaining relative pose parameters can chasers design close-range rendezvous trajectories close to uncooperative targets. The focus of this article is on active systems, such as TOF cameras or LIDAR. This paper proposes an attitude estimation scheme to obtain relative attitude parameters between uncooperative targets. This scheme utilizes LIDAR to obtain three-dimensional point clouds of non-cooperative targets, extracts key points and simplifies the number of point clouds through joint farthest point sampling and point cloud feature analysis, and then uses point fast feature histograms (FPFHs) and robust iterative closest point algorithms to achieve point cloud registration between every two frames. Finally, a filtering framework was designed, whose scheme is an extended Kalman filter designed for updating measurements of relative position, velocity, attitude, and angular velocity estimation. The experimental results show that this method can effectively achieve point cloud registration for close range rotation and translation motion, and can estimate the motion state of the target.