Pose determination of non-cooperative spacecraft based on multi-feature information fusion

Vision-based non-cooperative spacecraft capturing for on-orbit servicing, space-debris collections, space attack and defense, has been a research focus in the field of space robot technique, recently. However, it remains a challenge to determine the relative pose of non-cooperative spacecraft rapidly and accurately in the capturing task. This article proposes a novel method based on multi-feature information fusion to estimate the pose of non-cooperative spacecraft. In the proposed approach, the common apparatuses on the spacecraft are chosen as the identified features which are recognized by combining the region detection with the line detection. Then, the information which comes from the different object features is fused to calculate the pose of non-cooperative spacecraft. Three Experiments are carried out and the results verify the proposed approach.