A Multi-View Vision System for Astronaut Postural Reconstruction with Self-Calibration

Abstract

Space exploration missions involve significant participation from astronauts. Therefore, it is of great practical importance to assess the astronauts’ performance via various parameters in the cramped and weightless space station. In this paper, we proposed a calibration-free multi-view vision system for astronaut performance capture, including two modules: (1) an alternating iterative optimization of the camera pose and human pose is implemented to calibrate the extrinsic camera parameters with detected 2D keypoints. (2) Scale factors are restricted by the limb length to recover the real-world scale and the shape parameters are refined for subsequent postural reconstruction. These two modules can provide effective and efficient motion capture in a weightless space station. Extensive experiments using public datasets and the ground verification test data demonstrated the accuracy of the estimated camera pose and the effectiveness of the reconstructed human pose.

A Flexible Dynamic Reliability Simulation Approach for Predicting the Lifetime Consumption of Extravehicular Spacesuits during Uncertain Extravehicular Activities

“…The system performance, reliability, and maintainability should be weighed against the limitation of personnel ability and the technical level. The efficiency and safety of astronauts performing the intended operations are determined by the activity conditions, ergonomic characteristics, and reliability [27]. The number of times the spacesuit is available depends on factors such as the intensity and duration of the planned activity.…”