To meet the requirement of autonomous orbit determination, this paper proposes a fast curve fitting method based on earth ultraviolet features to obtain accurate earth vector direction, in order to achieve the high precision autonomous navigation. Firstly, combining the stable characters of earth ultraviolet radiance and the use of transmission model software of atmospheric radiation, the paper simulates earth ultraviolet radiation model on different time and chooses the proper observation band. Then the fast improved edge extracting method combined Sobel operator and local binary pattern (LBP) is utilized, which can both eliminate noises efficiently and extract earth ultraviolet limb features accurately. And earth’s centroid locations on simulated images are estimated via the least square fitting method using part of the limb edges. Taken advantage of the estimated earth vector direction and earth distance, Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is applied to realize the autonomous navigation finally. Experiment results indicate the proposed method can achieve a sub-pixel earth centroid location estimation and extremely enhance autonomous celestial navigation precision.
KEYWORDS: Clouds, Space operations, 3D modeling, Cameras, Detection and tracking algorithms, Reconstruction algorithms, Stereoscopic cameras, Visual process modeling, Technetium, 3D vision
Pose estimation is playing the vital role in the final approach phase of two spacecraft, one is the target spacecraft and the other one is the observation spacecraft. Traditional techniques are usually based on feature tracking, which will not work when sufficient features are unavailable. To deal with this problem, we present a stereo camera-based pose estimation method without feature tracking. First, stereo vision is used to reconstruct 2.5D of the target spacecraft and a 3D reconstruction is presented by merged all the point cloud of each viewpoint. Then a target-coordinate system is built using the reconstruction results. Finally, point cloud registration algorithm is used to solve the current pose between the observation spacecraft and the target spacecraft. Experimental results show that both the position errors and the attitude errors satisfy the requirements of pose estimation. The method provides a solution for pose estimation without knowing the information of the targets and this algorithm is with wider application range compared with the other algorithms based on feature tracking.
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