Precise monocular vision-based pose measurement system for lunar surface sampling manipulator

Space manipulator has been playing an increasingly important role in space exploration due to its flexibility and versatility. This paper is to design a vision-based pose measurement system for a four-degree-of-freedom (4-DOF) lunar surface sampling manipulator relying on a monitoring camera and several fiducial markers. The system first employs double plateaus histogram equalization for the markers to improve the robustness to varying noise and illumination. The markers are then accurately extracted in sub-pixel based on template matching and curved surface fitting. Finally, given the camera parameters and 3D reference points, the pose of the manipulator end-effector is solved from the 3D-to-2D point correspondences by combining a plane-based pose estimation method with rigid-body transformation. Experiment results show that the system achieves high-precision positioning and orientation performance. The measurement error is within 3 mm in position, and 0.2° in orientation, meeting the requirements for space manipulator operations.