Monocular Vision-based Two-stage Iterative Algorithm for Relative Position and Attitude Estimation of Docking Spacecraft

Visual sensors are used to measure the relative state of the chaser spacecraft to the target spacecraft during close range rendezvous phases. This article proposes a two-stage iterative algorithm based on an inverse projection ray approach to address the relative position and attitude estimation by using feature points and monocular vision. It consists of two stages: absolute orientation and depth recovery. In the first stage, Umeyama's algorithm is used to fit the three-dimensional (3D) model set and estimate the 3D point set while in the second stage, the depths of the observed feature points are estimated. This procedure is repeated until the result converges. Moreover, the effectiveness and convergence of the proposed algorithm are verified through theoretical analysis and mathematical simulation.