Three-dimensional location and attitude evaluation for rendezvous and docking operation using a single camera

In the automatic rendezvous and docking manoeuvre (RVD) of space activity, determining the 3-D location and attitude between two vehicles is most important. A vision system to perform the docking manipulation in RVD is described in this paper. An improved algorithm is used for calibrating the geometric parameters of a camera fixed on the tracking vehicle off-line. Because the line-off-sight angles of four markers on the target vehicle to the lens center of the camera can be computed according to the optical principle and vector theory, the locations of the vehicle are obtained from the solution for a set of nonlinear equations from the triangular theory. The attitude angles for the vehicles are solved by a translational matrix of target frame to vehicle frame. As the vehicle closes in to the target, sets of markers having different distance intervals or a list of calibration parameters for cameras with different fields of view are selected at the proper moment to improve the situation when at least one of the markers exceeds the field of camera view. The series of experiments is given. The vision system is run on a SUN-4/330 Sparc station system equipped with one image board IT-151 and a CCD TV camera. All software is written in C language.