This work introduces the Spacecraft Pose Network (SPN) for on-board estimation of the pose, i.e., the relative position and attitude, of a known non-cooperative spacecraft using monocular vision. In contrast to other state-of-the-art pose estimation approaches for spaceborne applications, the SPN method does not require the formulation of hand-engineered features and only requires a single grayscale image to determine the pose of the spacecraft relative to the camera. The SPN method uses a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with three branches to solve for the pose. The first branch of the CNN bootstraps a state-of-the-art object detector to detect a 2D bounding box around the target spacecraft. The region inside the bounding box is then used by the other two branches of the CNN to determine the attitude by initially classifying the input region into discrete coarse attitude labels before regressing to a finer estimate. The SPN method then uses a novel Gauss-Newton algorithm to estimate the position by using the constraints imposed by the detected 2D bounding box and the estimated attitude. The secondary contribution of this work is the generation of the Spacecraft PosE Estimation Dataset (SPEED). SPEED consists of synthetic as well as actual camera images of a mock-up of the Tango spacecraft from the PRISMA mission. The synthetic images are created by fusing OpenGL-based renderings of the spacecraft's 3D model with actual images of the Earth captured by the Himawari-8 meteorological satellite. The actual camera images are created using a 7 degrees-of-freedom robotic arm, which positions and orients a vision-based sensor with respect to a full-scale mock-up of the Tango spacecraft. The SPN method, trained only on synthetic images, produces degree-level attitude error and cm-level position errors when evaluated on the actual camera images not used during training.
Florida Institute of Technology（佛罗里达理工学院）；Energy Management Aerospace LLC（能源管理航空航天有限责任公司）
Space debris is on the rise due to the increasing demand for spacecraft for com-munication, navigation, and other applications. The Space Surveillance Network (SSN) tracks over 27,000 large pieces of debris and estimates the number of small, un-trackable fragments at over 1,00,000. To control the growth of debris, the for-mation of further debris must be reduced. Some solutions include deorbiting larger non-cooperative resident space objects (RSOs) or servicing satellites in or-bit. Both require rendezvous with RSOs, and the scale of the problem calls for autonomous missions. This paper introd…
Stanford Center for Professional Development（斯坦福专业发展中心）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Images of spacecraft photographed from other spacecraft operating in outer space are difficult to come by, especially at a scale typically required for deep learning tasks. Semantic image segmentation, object detection and localization, and pose estimation are well researched areas with powerful results for many applications, and would be very useful in autonomous spacecraft operation and rendezvous. However, recent studies show that these strong results in broad and common domains may generalize poorly even to specific industrial applications on earth. To address this, we propose a method for…
On-board estimation of the pose of an uncooperative target spacecraft is an essential task for future on-orbit servicing and close-proximity formation flying missions. However, two issues hinder reliable on-board monocular vision based pose estimation: robustness to illumination conditions due to a lack of reliable visual features and scarcity of image datasets required for training and benchmarking. To address these two issues, this work details the design and validation of a monocular vision based pose determination architecture for spaceborne applications. The primary contribution to the st…
The rapid proliferation of non-cooperative spacecraft and space debris in orbit has precipitated a surging demand for on-orbit servicing and space debris removal at a scale that only autonomous missions can address, but the prerequisite autonomous navigation and flightpath planning to safely capture an unknown, non-cooperative, tumbling space object is an open problem. This requires algorithms for real-time, automated spacecraft feature recognition to pinpoint the locations of collision hazards (e.g. solar panels or antennas) and safe docking features (e.g. satellite bodies or thrusters) so sa…
This work presents the most recent advances of the Robotic Testbed for Rendezvous and Optical Navigation (TRON) at Stanford University - the first robotic testbed capable of validating machine learning algorithms for spaceborne optical navigation. The TRON facility consists of two 6 degrees-of-freedom KUKA robot arms and a set of Vicon motion track cameras to reconfigure an arbitrary relative pose between a camera and a target mockup model. The facility includes multiple Earth albedo light boxes and a sun lamp to recreate the high-fidelity spaceborne illumination conditions. After the overview…
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
In this paper, we investigate the application of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication to improve the perception performance of autonomous vehicles. We present a robust cooperative perception framework with V2X communication using a novel vision Transformer. Specifically, we build a holistic attention model, namely V2X-ViT, to effectively fuse information across on-road agents (i.e., vehicles and infrastructure). V2X-ViT consists of alternating layers of heterogeneous multi-agent self-attention and multi-scale window self-attention, which captures inter-agent interaction and per-agent spat…
University of California at Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；Toyota Motor North America（丰田汽车北美公司）
Object detection plays a fundamental role in enabling Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA), which is regarded as the revolutionary solution to addressing safety, mobility, and sustainability issues of contemporary transportation systems. Although current computer vision technologies could provide satisfactory object detection results in occlusion-free scenarios, the perception performance of onboard sensors could be inevitably limited by the range and occlusion. Owing to flexible position and pose for sensor installation, infrastructure-based detection and tracking systems can enhance the perc…
Active visual tracking of space non-cooperative object is significant for future intelligent spacecraft to realise space debris removal, asteroid exploration, autonomous rendezvous and docking. However, existing works often consider this task into different subproblems (e.g. image preprocessing, feature extraction and matching, position and pose estimation, control law design) and optimize each module alone, which are trivial and sub-optimal. To this end, we propose an end-to-end active visual tracking method based on DQN algorithm, named as DRLAVT. It can guide the chasing spacecraft approach…
In this work, we have analyzed the problem of relative pose initialization between two satellites: a chaser and a non-cooperating target. The analysis has been targeted to two close-range methods based on a monocular camera system: the Sharma-Ventura-D'Amico (SVD) method and the silhouette matching method. Both methods are based on a priori knowledge of the target geometry, but neither fiducial markers nor a priori range measurements or state information are needed. The tests were carried out using a 2U CubeSat mock-up as target attached to a motorized rotary stage to simulate its relative mot…
A key requirement for autonomous on-orbit proximity operations is the estimation of a target spacecraft's relative pose (position and orientation). It is desirable to employ monocular cameras for this problem due to their low cost, weight, and power requirements. This work presents a novel convolutional neural network (CNN)-based monocular pose estimation system that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with low computational demand. In combination with a Blender-based synthetic data generation scheme, the system demonstrates the ability to generalize from purely synthetic training data to real …
City, University of London（伦敦大学城市学院）；European Space Agency（欧洲空间局）
Recent interest in on-orbit servicing and Active Debris Removal (ADR) missions have driven the need for technologies to enable non-cooperative rendezvous manoeuvres. Such manoeuvres put heavy burden on the perception capabilities of a chaser spacecraft. This paper demonstrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) capable of providing an initial coarse pose estimation of a target from a passive thermal infrared camera feed. Thermal cameras offer a promising alternative to visible cameras, which struggle in low light conditions and are susceptible to overexposure. Often, thermal information on t…
On-orbit proximity operations in space rendezvous, docking and debris removal require precise and robust 6D pose estimation under a wide range of lighting conditions and against highly textured background, i.e., the Earth. This paper investigates leveraging deep learning and photorealistic rendering for monocular pose estimation of known uncooperative spacecrafts. We first present a simulator built on Unreal Engine 4, named URSO, to generate labeled images of spacecrafts orbiting the Earth, which can be used to train and evaluate neural networks. Secondly, we propose a deep learning framework …
Dept. of Statistics, UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校统计系）；Dept. of Computer Science, UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校计算机科学系）；UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校（注：此处UCLA是加州大学洛杉矶分校的缩写，在上下文明确为机构时可提取））
Holistic 3D indoor scene understanding refers to jointly recovering the i) object bounding boxes, ii) room layout, and iii) camera pose, all in 3D. The existing methods either are ineffective or only tackle the problem partially. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end model that simultaneously solves all three tasks in real-time given only a single RGB image. The essence of the proposed method is to improve the prediction by i) parametrizing the targets (e.g., 3D boxes) instead of directly estimating the targets, and ii) cooperative training across different modules in contrast to training th…
Cross-Modal RGB-D Fusion Transformer for 6D Pose Estimation of Non-Cooperative Spacecraft with Stereo-Derived Depth
School of Physics, Northeast Normal University（东北师范大学物理学院）；Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Science（长春光学精密机械与物理研究所）
Minimizing traffic accidents between vehicles and pedestrians is one of the primary research goals in intelligent transportation systems. To achieve the goal, pedestrian orientation recognition and prediction of pedestrian's crossing or not-crossing intention play a central role. Contemporary approaches do not guarantee satisfactory performance due to limited field-of-view, lack of generalization, and high computational complexity. To overcome these limitations, we propose a real-time predictive pedestrian collision warning service (P2CWS) for two tasks: pedestrian orientation recognition (100…
Being capable of estimating the pose of uncooperative objects in space has been proposed as a key asset for enabling safe close-proximity operations such as space rendezvous, in-orbit servicing and active debris removal. Usual approaches for pose estimation involve classical computer vision-based solutions or the application of Deep Learning (DL) techniques. This work explores a novel DL-based methodology, using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), for estimating the pose of uncooperative spacecrafts. Contrary to other approaches, the proposed CNN directly regresses poses without needing any …
DreamSat-Pose: Spacecraft Pose Estimation from Single-View 3D Reconstructions and Learned 2D-3D Feature Matching
Wellesley College（韦尔斯利学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学）
Multi-Robot Relative Pose Estimation in SE(2) with Observability Analysis: A Comparison of Extended Kalman Filtering and Robust Pose Graph Optimization
This work presents a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture and a training procedure to enable robust and accurate pose estimation of a noncooperative spacecraft. First, a new CNN architecture is introduced that has scored a fourth place in the recent Pose Estimation Challenge hosted by Stanford's Space Rendezvous Laboratory (SLAB) and the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) of the European Space Agency (ESA). The proposed architecture first detects the object by regressing a 2D bounding box, then a separate network regresses the 2D locations of the known surface keypoints from an imag…
We present a first-person method for cooperative basketball intention prediction: we predict with whom the camera wearer will cooperate in the near future from unlabeled first-person images. This is a challenging task that requires inferring the camera wearer's visual attention, and decoding the social cues of other players. Our key observation is that a first-person view provides strong cues to infer the camera wearer's momentary visual attention, and his/her intentions. We exploit this observation by proposing a new cross-model EgoSupervision learning scheme that allows us to predict with wh…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；European Space Agency（欧洲空间局）
Autonomous vision-based spaceborne navigation is an enabling technology for future on-orbit servicing and space logistics missions. While computer vision in general has benefited from Machine Learning (ML), training and validating spaceborne ML models are extremely challenging due to the impracticality of acquiring a large-scale labeled dataset of images of the intended target in the space environment. Existing datasets, such as Spacecraft PosE Estimation Dataset (SPEED), have so far mostly relied on synthetic images for both training and validation, which are easy to mass-produce but fail to …
Optical cameras are gaining popularity as the suitable sensor for relative navigation in space due to their attractive sizing, power and cost properties when compared to conventional flight hardware or costly laser-based systems. However, a camera cannot infer depth information on its own, which is often solved by introducing complementary sensors or a second camera. In this paper, an innovative model-based approach is instead demonstrated to estimate the six-dimensional pose of a target object relative to the chaser spacecraft using solely a monocular setup. The observed facet of the target i…
