Abstract
The wide availability of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) electronics that can withstand Low Earth Orbit conditions has opened avenue for wide deployment of CubeSats and small-satellites. CubeSats thanks to their low developmental and launch costs offer new opportunities for rapidly demonstrating on-orbit surveillance capabilities. In our earlier work, we proposed development of SWIMSat (Space based Wide-angle Imaging of Meteors) a 3U CubeSat demonstrator that is designed to observe illuminated objects entering the Earth's atmosphere. The spacecraft would operate autonomously using a smart camera with vision algorithms to detect, track and report of objects. Several CubeSats can track an object in a coordinated fashion to pinpoint an object's trajectory. An extension of this smart camera capability is to track unilluminated objects utilizing capabilities we have been developing to track and navigate to Near Earth Objects (NEOs). This extension enables detecting and tracking objects that can't readily be detected by humans. The system maintains a dense star map of the night sky and performs round the clock observations. Standard optical flow algorithms are used to obtain trajectories of all moving objects in the camera field of view. Through a process of elimination, certain stars maybe occluded by a transiting unilluminated object which is then used to first detect and obtain a trajectory of the object. Using multiple cameras observing the event from different points of view, it may be possible then to triangulate the position of the object in space and obtain its orbital trajectory. In this work, the performance of our space object detection algorithm coupled with a spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control system is demonstrated.
Abstract (translated)
能够承受低地球轨道条件的商用现货（COTS）电子产品的广泛应用为CubeSats和小型卫星的广泛部署开辟了道路。 CubeSats由于其低开发和发射成本，为快速演示在轨监视功能提供了新的机会。在我们早期的工作中，我们提出了一种3U CubeSat演示器的SWIMSat（基于空间的流星广角成像）的开发，该演示器用于观察进入地球大气层的被照物体。该航天器将使用具有视觉算法的智能相机自主操作，以检测，跟踪和报告物体。多个CubeSat可以协调的方式跟踪对象以精确定位对象的轨迹。这种智能相机功能的扩展是利用我们开发的跟踪和导航到近地天体（NEO）的功能来跟踪未照明的物体。该扩展使得能够检测和跟踪人类不易检测的对象。该系统保持着夜空密集的星图，并进行全天候观测。标准光流算法用于获得摄像机视场中所有运动物体的轨迹。通过消除过程，某些恒星可能被过渡的未照明物体遮挡，然后该物体用于首先检测并获得物体的轨迹。使用从不同视点观察事件的多个摄像机，然后可以对物体在空间中的位置进行三角测量并获得其轨道轨迹。在这项工作中，我们展示了空间物体检测算法与航天器引导，导航和控制系统相结合的性能。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.02042
