Deep-Learning-Based Satellite Relative Pose Estimation Using Monocular Optical Images and 3D Structural Information

Relative pose estimation of a satellite is an essential task for aerospace missions, such as on-orbit servicing and close proximity formation flying. However, the changeable situation makes precise relative pose estimation difficult. This paper introduces a deep-learning-based satellite relative pose estimation method for monocular optical images. The method is geared towards uncooperative target satellites with known 3D models. This paper proposes a novel convolutional neural network combined with 3D prior knowledge expressed by the 3D model in the form of the point cloud. The method utilizes point cloud convolution to extract features from the point cloud. To make the result more precise, a loss function that is more suitable for satellite pose estimation tasks is designed. For training and testing the proposed method, large amounts of data are required. This paper constructs a satellite pose estimation dataset BUAA-SID-POSE 1.0 by simulation. The proposed method is applied to the dataset and shows desirable performance on the pose estimation task. The proposed technique can be used to accomplish monocular vision-based relative pose estimation tasks in space-borne applications.