<title>Vision navigator for free-flying robots</title>

Abstract

A vision technique applicable to the sixth degree-of-freedom navigation of free-flying space robots is discussed. The technique consist of a feature finder which matches points in the environment with image locations and a recursive estimator based on the extended Kalman filter which uses measurements of the image locations to update the state estimate recursively. Experimental results are presented which demonstrate the convergence and state tracking properties of the system. Results include the finding that a vision navigator can be implemented with current off-the-shelf equipment if a sufficiently simple object in the environment acts as the navigation target.