Abstract:

Considering a spinning non-cooperative target on orbit without prior information about the geometrical structure and inertia parameters, a decoupled method is proposed for estimating the relative state using the feature points observed by a stereo camera. First of all, the dynamics of the non-cooperative and the kinematics of the feature points are described, respectively. Then, to overcome the performance degradation caused by the uncertainty of the feature points’ positions relative to the target’s center-of-mass, the motion and projection model of the relative feature are built to decouple the estimations of the rotational and translational motion. Finally, the filters are designed to estimate the relative state of the non-cooperative target. The simulation results demonstrate the validation and performance of the proposed method.

Key words: Spinning non cooperative target, Relative state estimation, Stereo camera, Relative feature