Autonomous on-orbit satellite servicing and inspection benefits from an inspector satellite that can autonomously gain as much information as possible about the primary satellite. This includes performance of articulated objects such as solar arrays, antennas, and sensors. This paper presents a method of characterizing the articulation of a satellite using resolved monocular imagery. A simulated point cloud representing a nominal satellite with articulating solar panels and a complex articulating appendage is developed and projected to the image coordinates that would be seen from an inspector following a given inspection route. A method is developed to analyze the resulting trajectory matrix. The developed method takes advantage of the fact that the route of the inspector satellite is known to enable the reprojection error to be used as an objective function for optimization of a model that best describes the feature points seen. Once the model is calculated, it can be compared to the known truth. Simulating the input data allows different inspection routes to easily be evaluated. Particularly, the effects of fly-by and natural motion circumnavigation inspection routes with sub-optimal illumination are investigated using a set of newly proposed evaluation metrics.
Illumination effects on satellite articulation characterization from a trajectory matrix using optimization
2018-03-01
2140791 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
Satellite Articulation Characterization from an Image Trajectory Matrix Using Optimization
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