Parallel vision-based pose estimation for non-cooperative spacecraft

Abstract

This article proposes a relative pose estimation method between non-cooperative spacecrafts based on parallel binocular vision. As the information of non-cooperative spacecraft in space is not accessible, the target is considered to be freely tumbling in space. The line feature of non-cooperative target is used to extract the feature points first; then the stereo matching and three-dimensional restructuring are taken for the feature points; finally, an algorithm based on parallel binocular vision algorithm is used to calculate the relative pose between the target coordinate and the world coordinate. The experimental results show that the proposed method has high-accuracy real-time performance.