Non-cooperative spacecraft pose tracking based on point cloud feature

Abstract

On-orbit services have been paid more and more attention for its role in spacecraft life-extension, capacity improvement and on-orbit debris removal. As most of on-orbit targets are non-cooperative, relatively accurate pose measurement is very essential for subsequent operations. However, with the rapid development of TriDAR, flash LIDAR and other laser scanning equipment in non-cooperative target measurement, it becomes more imperative to research methods for non-cooperative target pose tracking based on 3D point cloud feature. In this paper, a method for non-cooperative target pose tracking based on point cloud feature is proposed. Firstly, the target is identified using curvature, normal, density and other geometric features of the point cloud. Then the particle filter algorithm is used to recognize the position and orientation of the target being tracked by calculating the similarity of the point cloud features of two adjacent frames. Experimental results showed that the proposed method could effectively identify the features of non-cooperative targets and track their position and attitude.