Pose estimation of non-cooperative targets without feature tracking

Pose estimation is playing the vital role in the final approach phase of two spacecraft, one is the target spacecraft and the other one is the observation spacecraft. Traditional techniques are usually based on feature tracking, which will not work when sufficient features are unavailable. To deal with this problem, we present a stereo camera-based pose estimation method without feature tracking. First, stereo vision is used to reconstruct 2.5D of the target spacecraft and a 3D reconstruction is presented by merged all the point cloud of each viewpoint. Then a target-coordinate system is built using the reconstruction results. Finally, point cloud registration algorithm is used to solve the current pose between the observation spacecraft and the target spacecraft. Experimental results show that both the position errors and the attitude errors satisfy the requirements of pose estimation. The method provides a solution for pose estimation without knowing the information of the targets and this algorithm is with wider application range compared with the other algorithms based on feature tracking.