Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Park, Tae Ha, D'Amico, Simone
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11661
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917129596436480
author Park, Tae Ha
D'Amico, Simone
author_facet Park, Tae Ha
D'Amico, Simone
contents This work presents Spacecraft Pose Network v3 (SPNv3), a Neural Network (NN) for monocular pose estimation of a known, non-cooperative target spacecraft. SPNv3 is designed and trained to be computationally efficient while providing robustness to spaceborne images that have not been observed during offline training and validation on the ground. These characteristics are essential to deploying NNs on space-grade edge devices. They are achieved through careful NN design choices, and an extensive trade-off analysis reveals features such as data augmentation, transfer learning and vision transformer architecture as a few of those that contribute to simultaneously maximizing robustness and minimizing computational overhead. Experiments demonstrate that the final SPNv3 can achieve state-of-the-art pose accuracy on hardware-in-the-loop images from a robotic testbed while having trained exclusively on computer-generated synthetic images, effectively bridging the domain gap between synthetic and real imagery. At the same time, SPNv3 runs well above the update frequency of modern satellite navigation filters when tested on a representative graphical processing unit system with flight heritage. Overall, SPNv3 is an efficient, flight-ready NN model readily applicable to close-range rendezvous and proximity operations with target resident space objects.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_11661
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging the Domain Gap for Flight-Ready Spaceborne Vision
Park, Tae Ha
D'Amico, Simone
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
This work presents Spacecraft Pose Network v3 (SPNv3), a Neural Network (NN) for monocular pose estimation of a known, non-cooperative target spacecraft. SPNv3 is designed and trained to be computationally efficient while providing robustness to spaceborne images that have not been observed during offline training and validation on the ground. These characteristics are essential to deploying NNs on space-grade edge devices. They are achieved through careful NN design choices, and an extensive trade-off analysis reveals features such as data augmentation, transfer learning and vision transformer architecture as a few of those that contribute to simultaneously maximizing robustness and minimizing computational overhead. Experiments demonstrate that the final SPNv3 can achieve state-of-the-art pose accuracy on hardware-in-the-loop images from a robotic testbed while having trained exclusively on computer-generated synthetic images, effectively bridging the domain gap between synthetic and real imagery. At the same time, SPNv3 runs well above the update frequency of modern satellite navigation filters when tested on a representative graphical processing unit system with flight heritage. Overall, SPNv3 is an efficient, flight-ready NN model readily applicable to close-range rendezvous and proximity operations with target resident space objects.
title Bridging the Domain Gap for Flight-Ready Spaceborne Vision
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11661