Date of Award:
5-2008
Document Type:
Thesis
Degree Name:
Master of Science (MS)
Department:
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Committee Chair(s)
Rees Fullmer
Committee
Rees Fullmer
Committee
Scott Budge
Committee
Charles Swenson
Abstract
Future autonomous space missions will require autonomous rendezvous and docking operations. The servicing spacecraft must be able to determine the relative 6 degree-of-freedom (6 DOF) motion between the vehicle and the target spacecraft. One method to determine the relative 6 DOF position and attitude is with 3D ladar imaging. Ladar sensor systems can capture close-proximity range images of the target spacecraft, producing 3D point cloud data sets. These sequentially collected point-cloud data sets were then registered with one another using a point correspondence-less variant of the Iterative Closest Points (ICP) algorithm to determine the relative 6 DOF displacements. Simulation experiments were performed and indicated that the mean-squared error (MSE), angular error, mean, and standard deviations for position and orientation estimates did not vary as a function of position and attitude and meet most minimum angular and translational error requirements for rendezvous and dock. Furthermore, the computational times required by this algorithm were comparable to previously reported variants of the point-to-point and point-to-plane-based ICP variants for single iterations when the initialization was already performed.
Checksum
6da3c3079f89901190e6eb6a09fb00a2
Recommended Citation
Fenton, Ronald Christopher, "A Ladar-Based Pose Estimation Algorithm for Determining Relative Motion of a Spacecraft for Autonomous Rendezvous and Dock" (2008). All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023. 69.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/69
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