Pose Tracking of Spacecraft Based on Point Cloud DCA Features

Abstract

As a key on-orbit service technology, relative measurement of non-cooperative spatial targets can give accurate relative pose for the unmanned rendezvous and docking of non-cooperative targets. With the rapid development of three-dimensional data acquisition equipment such as flash lidar in the field of non-cooperative targets’ pose measurement in recent years, research on the pose tracking technology based on the three-dimensional (3D) point cloud of non-cooperative targets has become more and more urgent. In this paper, we proposed an approach for autonomous recognition and pose tracking of non-cooperative targets based on point cloud features. For this method, the density, curvature and normal angle of a non-cooperative target 3D point cloud are first calculated as the local feature description (DCA) of the point cloud, and then the feature description is used to match and remove errors through RANSAC. Finally the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm is adopted to obtain the precise pose of the non-cooperative target. Experimental results have shown that this approach can effectively find the features of non-cooperative tumbling targets, get rid of the dependence on the target model and database, and realize the pose tracking of non-cooperative targets.