Real-time object determination for space robotics

The successful creation of an autonomous space robot for on-orbit satellite servicing and inspection depends greatly upon the vision understanding subsystem. Off-the-shelf vision systems do not provide the three spatial and one temporal dimension modeling necessary for this complex task. Prior research has generally investigated the four-dimensional scene understanding problem at the expense off a true real-time capability. The authors have begun research at the Lockheed Digital Image Processing Laboratory on a space robot vision subsystem providing both a real-time processing and four-dimensional object determination. The authors describe their initial approach