Ground tests for visual based determination of formation flying spacecraft trajectories

Advances in computational capabilities and in the robustness of the dedicated algorithms are suggesting visual based techniques as a fundamental asset in per- forming space operations such as rendezvous, docking and on-orbit servicing. This paper discusses a vision based technique in a scenario where the chaser sa- tellite must identify a non-cooperative target, and use visual information to esti- mate the relative kinematic state. A hardware-in-the-loop experiment is per- formed to test the possibility to perform a space rendezvous using the camera as a standalone sensor. This is accomplished thanks to a dedicated testbed, consti- tuted by a dark room hosting a robotic manipulator. The camera is mounted on the end effector, that moves replicating the satellite formation dynamics, includ- ing control actions that depend at each time step by the state estimation based on the visual algorithm, thus realizing a closed GNC loop.