A study on autonomous video navigation in close range with a cooperative target

Abstract

Autonomous service on orbit is a new developing trend of space service, in order to realize on orbit servicing, the problem of autonomous relative navigation needs to be solved. On the foundation of several typical schemes used by American, Russian as well as ESA etc., the main conception of our autonomous video navigation system is determined. The beacon system is composed of five beacon lamps, and has four invariant features relative to transformations of rotation, translation and scale. Two sets of double camera systems constituted of three fixed lens cameras with short focus are applied to the longer distance and the shorter distance respectively. Three kinds of measures are put forward to suppress the interference of miscellaneous lights. Then, the study and simulation of beacon recognition as well as the determination of relative positions and attitudes are expounded in this paper, the algorithm flow chart and corresponding simulation results are given. A kind of spiral capturing algorithm is used to increase the capturing efficiency, and the beacon recognition algorithm is designed according to the invariant features of beacon system to increase the recognition capability. In the determination of relative positions and attitudes, monocular algorithm and binocular algorithm are combined to ensure the reliability. Simulation results have verified the feasibility of the design of autonomous video navigation sensor and the autonomous video navigation techniques.