Semi-physical simulation system for close-range rendezvous based on binocular vision

Binocular vision is expected to be more and more applied in the autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations of spacecraft. Aiming at this issue, a cost-effective, reasonable and feasible semi-physical simulation system is proposed to verify the key algorithms, such as feature recognition, pose estimation, guidance and vision servo control. In this simulation system, a 3D scenario of the spacecraft rendezvous is established based on computer graphics technology, and the virtual images of space binocular cameras are generated through perspective projection. The physical cameras are applied to capture the virtual images on the display so that the real imaging process is introduced in the simulation loop. The experiment results verify the effectiveness of the proposed simulation method.