Laser-Camera Vision Sensing for Spacecraft Mobile Robot Navigation

The advent of spacecraft mobile robots—free-flying sensor platforms and communications devices intended to accompany astronauts or remotely operate on space missions both inside and outside of a spacecraft—has demanded the development of a simple and effective navigation schema. One such system under exploration involves the use of a laser-camera arrangement to predict relative positioning of the mobile robot. By projecting laser beams from the robot, a 3D reference frame can be introduced. Thus, as the robot shifts in position, the position reference frame produced by the laser images is correspondingly altered. Using normalization and camera registration techniques presented in this paper, the relative translation and rotation of the robot in 3D are determined from these reference frame transformations.