Relative pose determination of uncooperative known target based on extracting region of interest

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of relative pose determination between a model-known uncooperative space target and a chaser spacecraft using three-dimensional point cloud. A novel, reliable and real-time relative pose determination framework is proposed, which is composed of a region of interest–based initial pose acquisition method and a template matching iterative closest point algorithm for tracking pose. The initial pose is obtained by the principal component analysis method which aligns the region of interest extracted from the scanning point cloud with the region of interest of the known model point cloud, and a three-dimensional convex hull is constructed to extract the region of interest fast. To improve the iterative closest point, the registration between the template point cloud generated by the pose of last frame and the point cloud of the current frame is used to replace the registration between the local scanning point cloud and the global model point cloud. In addition, the performance (stability, low cost and their robustness against noise) of the proposed initial pose acquisition method and the accuracy and reliability of the pose tracking algorithm have been demonstrated by the numerical experiments. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the field experiment.