Abstract:

According to the application requirements of space manipulator capturing of flying targets, the problem of tracking the cooperative targets in the close range rendezvous and docking was investigated, and a novel method including three main steps was proposed. Firstly, according to the target’s luminescent property the feature selection algorithm was designed to eliminate the influence of invalid information. Secondly, using these features a method of similarity comparison between different frames and the strategy of template updating were investigated to solve the problem of invalidation of original features due to the variation of targets’ orientation and illumination. Thirdly, aiming at the problem of accessing and coming out of the view field, a method of abandoning and retrieving targets was designed. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed approach is fast and robust, and it can realize tracking speed of 10 frame/s.

Key words:

manipulator capturing, autonomous rendezvous and docking, CamShift algorithm, object tracking, back project