Related papers: Bridging the Domain Gap for Flight-Ready Spaceborn…
This work presents Spacecraft Pose Network v2 (SPNv2), a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for pose estimation of noncooperative spacecraft across domain gap. SPNv2 is a multi-scale, multi-task CNN which consists of a shared multi-scale…
On-board estimation of the pose of an uncooperative target spacecraft is an essential task for future on-orbit servicing and close-proximity formation flying missions. However, two issues hinder reliable on-board monocular vision based pose…
This work introduces the Spacecraft Pose Network (SPN) for on-board estimation of the pose, i.e., the relative position and attitude, of a known non-cooperative spacecraft using monocular vision. In contrast to other state-of-the-art pose…
A key requirement for autonomous on-orbit proximity operations is the estimation of a target spacecraft's relative pose (position and orientation). It is desirable to employ monocular cameras for this problem due to their low cost, weight,…
We address the problem of estimating the relative 6D pose, i.e., position and orientation, of a target spacecraft, from a monocular image, a key capability for future autonomous Rendezvous and Proximity Operations. Due to the difficulty of…
This work presents a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture and a training procedure to enable robust and accurate pose estimation of a noncooperative spacecraft. First, a new CNN architecture is introduced that has scored a…
Autonomous vision-based spaceborne navigation is an enabling technology for future on-orbit servicing and space logistics missions. While computer vision in general has benefited from Machine Learning (ML), training and validating…
Being capable of estimating the pose of uncooperative objects in space has been proposed as a key asset for enabling safe close-proximity operations such as space rendezvous, in-orbit servicing and active debris removal. Usual approaches…
Spacecraft Pose Estimation (SPE) is a fundamental capability for autonomous space operations such as rendezvous, docking, and in-orbit servicing. Hybrid pipelines that combine object detection, keypoint regression, and Perspective-n-Point…
This work presents an Online Supervised Training (OST) method to enable robust vision-based navigation about a non-cooperative spacecraft. Spaceborne Neural Networks (NN) are susceptible to domain gap as they are primarily trained with…
Spacecraft pose estimation is a key task to enable space missions in which two spacecrafts must navigate around each other. Current state-of-the-art algorithms for pose estimation employ data-driven techniques. However, there is an absence…
Solving depth estimation with monocular cameras enables the possibility of widespread use of cameras as low-cost depth estimation sensors in applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. However, learning such a scalable depth…
The advent of novel view synthesis techniques such as NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has enabled learning precise 3D models only from posed monocular images. Although these methods are attractive, they hold two major limitations that…
Estimating the pose of an uncooperative spacecraft is an important computer vision problem for enabling the deployment of automatic vision-based systems in orbit, with applications ranging from on-orbit servicing to space debris removal.…
We address the estimation of the 6D pose of an unknown target spacecraft relative to a monocular camera, a key step towards the autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations required by future Active Debris Removal missions. We present a…
Perceiving the three-dimensional (3D) structure of the spacecraft is a prerequisite for successfully executing many on-orbit space missions, and it can provide critical input for many downstream vision algorithms. In this paper, we propose…
Miniaturized autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining popularity due to their small size, enabling new tasks such as indoor navigation or people monitoring. Nonetheless, their size and simple electronics pose severe challenges…
We present a novel optimization algorithm called DroNeRF for the autonomous positioning of monocular camera drones around an object for real-time 3D reconstruction using only a few images. Neural Radiance Fields or NeRF, is a novel view…
Tracking the 6D pose of objects in video sequences is important for robot manipulation. This work presents se(3)-TrackNet, a data-driven optimization approach for long term, 6D pose tracking. It aims to identify the optimal relative pose…
Spacecraft pose estimation plays a vital role in many on-orbit space missions, such as rendezvous and docking, debris removal, and on-orbit maintenance. At present, space images contain widely varying lighting conditions, high contrast and…