A Pose Measurement Method of Non-cooperative Target Based on Monocular Vision

A method based on monocular vision is presented in this paper to estimate the pose of the non-cooperative target spacecraft. It directly takes the image features of the docking ring and solar panel as the recognized object. The circular feature is used to restore two solutions of the relative position and orientation, the vanishing points formed by the two parallel lines of the solar panel are applied to solve the duality problem and restore the roll angle. This algorithm provides a closed-form solution using simple mathematics, therefore, it is suitable to space applications where the computation capability of the on-board processor is very limited. Numerical simulations show that the proposed algorithm can effectively estimate the pose of the non-cooperative target spacecraft.