A Relative Navigation Module Based on Visual and Ranging Measurements for CubeSat Applications

This paper describes the design, characterization and preliminary testing of a relative navigation module based on electro-optical sensors and tailored for close-proximity operations with respect to passively cooperative targets of the CubeSat class. The proposed unit relies on a laser range finder with a relatively large beam divergence and a visual camera. The laser range finder operates in the near-infrared band and is exploited to both provide direct range measurements and actively illuminate the scene. The visual sensor and its optics are coherently chosen and allow obtaining full pose (i.e., relative position and attitude) measurements by processing the acquired target’s images. The pose estimation procedure is based on the detection and identification of a set of fiducial markers installed on the target surface and highly reflective in the near-infrared band. Experimental tests are carried out at components level to both characterise the laser range finder and preliminarily assess the performance of the proposed pose determination approach. The results show that the proposed approach is robust to a large number of outliers, produced by highly reflective insulation layers typically covering satellite surfaces. Also, in all the considered test cases pose estimates with pixel-level reprojection errors, corresponding to sub-millimetre accuracy, are obtained.