Experimental Validation of Stereoscopic Satellite Relative State Estimation

This work presents a three degrees-of-freedom laboratory experiment in which both the states and the moment of inertia of a non-cooperative target satellite were successfully estimated by a chaser satellite using stereovision measurements only. In the experiments conducted at the Technion's Dis- tributed Space Systems Laboratory, two satellite models, a target and a chaser, were floated on an air-bearing table. A stereovision system com- posed of two cameras mounted on the chaser satellite model was used to generate sequences of image frames of the target satellite model. The rela- tive range, body angle and angular velocity between the chaser and the tar- get were estimated using the left and right camera movies only. Moreover, the estimation algorithm also successfully identified the target moment of inertia using a multiple hypotheses-based filter.