The number of space debris population has risen during the last years. The amount of inoperative objects is exponentially increasing, and this may cause problems in current and future satellite missions in both Low and Geocentric Earth Orbits. On-Orbit Servicing is rising as a solution for extending the operative life of spacecraft. But the situation changes with already defunct satellites, high-altitude upper rocket stages, or fragments and leftovers, which are continuously threatening the safety in orbit. Active Debris Removal can be an influential expansion of the satellite’s servicing missions, where a chaser satellite will capture a designated target, and discard it in a controlled manner not only to avoid future production of new debris, but also to reduce the population on certain high demand orbits in forthcoming missions. This requires new levels of autonomy with respect to the rendezvous maneuver. Hence, new challenges go along with those demanding requirements. This dissertation presents a methodology for estimating the position and orientation of a rocket body in orbit, i.e. the target, under a translational and rotational motion with respect to a chaser spacecraft. The latter has the task of matching the target’s dynamics for a safe autonomous rendezvous and capture. During this maneuver, the chaser would employ a Time-of-Flight camera that acquires a point cloud of 3D coordinates, mapping the sensed target’s surface. Once the system identifies the objective, it initializes the chaser-to-target relative position and orientation. After initialization, a tracking procedure enables the system to sense the evolution of the target’s pose between frames. The proposed algorithms are evaluated using simulated point clouds, generated with a CAD model of the target, and the PMD CamCube 3.0 camera specifications. Additionally, a scaled printed model was used with an actual sensor to capture real data and assess the routines performance.    «

The number of space debris population has risen during the last years. The amount of inoperative objects is exponentially increasing, and this may cause problems in current and future satellite missions in both Low and Geocentric Earth Orbits. On-Orbit Servicing is rising as a solution for extending the operative life of spacecraft. But the situation changes with already defunct satellites, high-altitude upper rocket stages, or fragments and leftovers, which are continuously threatening the safe...    »