Pose measurement of a non-cooperative spacecraft based on circular features

As some of the valuable satellites can maintain working after on-orbit servicing, it's meaningful to do research on the autonomous rendezvous. Most of these satellites have no target location markers or rendezvous sensors, the so-called non-cooperative satellites. Thus, the pose measurement is the key to the on-orbit servicing. In this paper, a closed-form solution for circle pose measurement is proposed. It is used to obtain the position of the adapter ring on the target satellite and effectively solves the problem for circular feature, requiring neither camera motion nor the radius of the circle. It can get the unique solution exactly without using a correspondence criterion. The method is experimented on both synthetic images and real images. And the results illustrate the good performance of the method compared with other existing algorithms.