Laboratory test of pose determination algorithms for uncooperative spacecraft

This paper presents an experimental activity carried out to evaluate the performance of LIDAR-based algorithms for pose determination of uncooperative space targets. The test setup includes a scanning LIDAR and a monocular camera mounted with a fixed relative geometry, providing 3D (point cloud) and 2D (image) representations of the same scene within the shared portion of their respective Field-of-Views. A scaled satellite mock-up is used as target. The target pose with respect to the camera, computed implementing a standard solution to the Perspective-n-Points problem, is exploited as a reference to verify the performance of the LIDAR-based pose estimation process. To this end, an original semi-analytical approach is developed to determine the relative extrinsic calibration between camera and LIDAR.