US-RIPTIDE – Unknown Satellite Realtime Inspection, Pose, Tracking and IDEntification

Scientific Systems Company, Inc. (SSCI) proposes a low-cost, unified, monocular image processing solution of characterizing uncooperative and unknown on-orbit spacecraft to support on-orbit servicing operations including on-orbit inspection, characterization, life extension, capture planning, end-of-life servicing and potential active debris removal (ADR) as required in the developing On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (OSAM) market. Specifically, we propose to advance the state of the art with autonomous on-orbit pose and structural component classification for orbiting spacecraft given no a priori knowledge of features nor structural characteristics. This will enable a spacecraft to support on-orbit acquisition and servicing operations by providing relative navigation, autonomous docking/grappling coordinates, inspection capabilities, and anomaly resolution by determining the relative 6D pose and identifying the structure of an unknown satellite (i.e. no prior CAD model or training data) with a single camera. The proposed work will Demonstrate the potential benefit leveraging inexpensive low-swap monocular systems for reliable Relative Navigation and Structure Identification, advance the State-Of-The-Art and extend the applicability of Pose Estimation and Structure Identification algorithms by withdrawing the constraint of a priori target knowledge and define a flexible, extensible solution that can support a wide variety of DoD or Commercial OSAM missions with minimum (or no) tailoring.