Flight demonstration of spaceborne real-time angles-only navigation to a noncooperative target in low earth orbit

Abstract

The paper presents the flight performance of the onboard vision-based navigation software employed during the AVANTI experiment. Two autonomous rendezvous to a noncooperative object have been performed in orbit, first from 13 km to 1 km separation, then from 3 km to 50 m. Despite the poor visibility conditions and the strong orbit perturbations encountered at low altitude, the onboard filter was able to support the onboard guidance and control algorithms with accurate and reliable relative state estimation, enabling thus a safe and smooth approach.

Flight Demonstration of Autonomous Noncooperative Rendezvous in Low Earth Orbit

“…More details regarding the target detection results and relative navigation challenges at far-mid range are discussed in Ref. 37.…”

“…[21] to the flight-release form described in Ref. [37]. According to them, the target identification task firstly exploits a kinematic approach based on the fact that the target apparent trajectory differs greatly from the trajectories of other parasite bodies.…”

“…The measurement update step and the process noise trade-off and settings are respectively described in Ref. [38] and [37]. Regarding the implementation aspects, the whole navigation task (i.e., image processing and relative navigation filter) is executed every 30 s. This feature derives from the image extraction characteristics described in section 2.1.1 and from the computational performances of the onboard processor and leaves no room to implement computational demanding filtering techniques.…”

In-orbit experience and lessons learned from the AVANTI experiment

“…The main reason is that the navigation accuracy improves decreasing the inter-satellite distance, allowing to accept a larger noise of the measurements (e.g., centroid errors, downgraded knowledge of the orientation of the sensor). 10,11 Aside from such peculiarities of the vision-based approach, at close-range difficulties arose due to the following technical constraints of the BIROS platform. First, the star-tracker is a far-range camera whose field of view corresponds to an area of solely 10×15 m at 50 m of inter-satellite separation.…”

Relative Pose and Inertia Determination of Unknown Satellite Using Monocular Vision

“…In the paper [2], an overview of the existing visual-based systems is presented, and in the paper [3], the state of the art of the cooperative and uncooperative satellite pose determination techniques are presented. A set of papers are devoted to the developing and flight testing of the algorithms for relative center of mass position determination of the unknown target using anglesonly visual navigation [4][5][6]. The relative pose navigation system based on image processing was implemented in several projects; for example, PRISMA [7,8], it is used during docking stage of the "Progress" to ISS [9] and also of the cargo spacecraft ATV [10][11][12].…”