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 tech-nique is implemented for pose initial acquisition, while pose tracking is carried out by Iterative Closest Point algorithms based on different matching approach-es. In order to evaluate the achievable accuracy in pose estimation, a numerical simulator is developed implementing realistic debris geometry, target/removal-system relative dynamics, and sensor operation. Results relevant to a large de-bris 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.