Vision-based methods to determine the relative pose of an uncooperative orbiting object are investigated in applications to spacecraft proximity operations, such as on-orbit servicing, spacecraft formation flying, and small bodies exploration. Depending on whether the object is known or unknown, a shape model of the orbiting target object may have to be constructed autonomously in real-time by making use of only optical measurements. The Simultaneous Estimation of Pose and Shape (SEPS) algorithm that does not require a priori knowledge of the pose and shape of the target is presented. This makes use of a novel measurement equation and filter that can efficiently use optical flow information along with a star tracker to estimate the target's angular rotational and translational relative velocity as well as its center of gravity. Depending on the mission constraints, SEPS can be augmented by a more accurate offline, on-board 3D reconstruction of the target shape, which allows for the estimation of the pose as a known target. The use of Structure from Motion (SfM) for this purpose is discussed. A model-based approach for pose estimation of known targets is also presented. The architecture and implementation of both the proposed approaches are elucidated and their performance metrics are evaluated through numerical simulations by using a dataset of images that are synthetically generated according to a chaser/target relative motion in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO).

He received a PhD in Microsystems and Microelectronics atÉcole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a Master of Engineering in Astronautic Engineering from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and a Bachelor of Engineering in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Naples "Federico II". His current research activity focuses on Spacecraft Navigation, mainly relative navigation, vision-based, GNSS-based and multisensor-based.

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We present a novel approach to reduce the processing time required to derive the estimation uncertainty map in deep learning-based optical flow determination methods. Without uncertainty aware reasoning, the optical flow model, especially when it is used for mission critical fields such as robotics and aerospace, can cause catastrophic failures. Although several approaches such as the ones based on Bayesian neural networks have been proposed to handle this issue, they are computationally expensive. Thus, to speed up the processing time, our approach applies a generative model, which is trained by input images and an uncertainty map derived through a Bayesian approach. By using synthetically generated images of spacecraft, we demonstrate that the trained generative model can produce the uncertainty map 100∼700 times faster than the conventional uncertainty estimation method used for training the generative model itself. We also show that the quality of uncertainty map derived by the generative model is close to that of the original uncertainty map. By applying the proposed approach, the deep learning model operated in real-time can avoid disastrous failures by considering the uncertainty as well as achieving better performance removing uncertain portions of the prediction result.