Abstract:

Considering the mission of a microsatellite approaching an unknown and non-cooperative target satellite, a method for relative state estimation of the target satellite using a monocular camera is proposed. Firstly, the relative kinematics and dynamics models between the target and the tracking satellite are established. Then, the pixel location of the feature points on the target is used as the filter input, and the relative states including relative position, relative velocity, relative attitude, angular velocity, inertia ratio and feature position of the target are estimated. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the validation of the proposed method with the attitude estimation error less than 2°, the position estimation error less than 0.1 m and the average position estimation error of feature points less than 0.04 m.

Key words:  Non-cooperative target satellite, Relative state estimation, Monocular camera, Extended Kalman filter