Autonomous rendezvous and docking of an unknown tumbling space target with a monocular camera

The feasibility of a monocular-based relative navigation for rendezvous and docking of a fully unknown space object as a target is researched. A servicing spacecraft equipped with a monocular camera as the only relative measurement sensor is to rendezvous with the target. No a priori information about the target, such as shape, size and inertia moments, is available for the servicing spacecraft. Two extended Kalman filters with different models are used for relative orbit estimation in far range and relative position and attitude estimation in close range respectively. The algorithms presented in the paper enable the autonomous rendezvous and docking based on only a monocular. A full rendezvous and docking flight is simulated for the validation the proposed navigation filter. And the results are discussed.