Active Vision-based Pose Estimation of an Uncooperative Target

This paper aims at investigating the performance of a LIDAR-based system for pose determination of a known debris. A customized template matching technique is implemented for pose initial acquisition, while pose tracking is carried out by Iterative Closest Point algorithms based on different matching approaches. In order to evaluate the achievable accuracy in pose estimation, a numerical simulator is developed implementing realistic debris geometry, target/removalsystem relative dynamics, and sensor operation. Results relevant to a large debris in Low Earth Orbit show that even relatively sparse point clouds allow the pose to be computed with sub-degree accuracy in attitude and sub-centimeter accuracy in the relative position.