Pose measurement of non-cooperative spacecraft based on point cloud

Abstract

The non-cooperative target pose measurement has become an essential key technology for the space manipulation activities such as capture of the fault spacecrafts, on-orbit debris removal and so on. A new pose measurement of non-cooperative target based on point cloud is proposed in this paper, including preprocess of point cloud data, recognition of solar panels, position and attitude measurement based on identified solar panels. The simulation experiments are carried out on several different types of spacecraft and the results show that the method is reasonable and feasible. Compared with the traditional overall pose measurement, our method has better speed and accuracy. Compared with the traditional method using two-dimensional image, our method is less affected by illumination and robust. Our method of pose measurement meets the requirement of on-orbit service and has great reference value for the engineering application.