ROBOTIC VISION TECHNOLOGY FOR SPACE STATION AND SATELLITE APPLICATIONS

This paper presents the robotic vision technologies newly developed for satellites and space station robotic applications at the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Laboratory of the University of Waterloo and at the Vision, Intelligence and Robotics Technologies Corp. (VIRTEK). The first part of the paper presents how the PAMI-VIRTEK Vision technologies are engineered to support the STEAR (Space Station, Strategic Technologies in Automation and Robotics Program) sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency. The second describes the use of stereo CCD camera for sensing the deformed shape of a third generation satellite. It addresses the notion of shape interpolation and error reduction.