Vision-Based Relative Navigation for Rendezvous and Docking of Spacecraft.

For the final phase of spacecraft autonomous rendezvous and docking, the vision relative navigation method based on the information of the specific reference light sources was presented. Under the assumption of small attitude angle, the relative navigation models were deduced. The closed-form solution for relative attitude and position parameters based on the vision navigation models was derived. The reduced order Unscented Kalman Filtering (UKF) algorithm was designed to estimate the information of relative attitude angle and relative attitude angle velocity. Simulation results show that the proposed approach provides a convenient way for obtaining the information of relative position and relative attitude, and the reduced order UKF can improve the accuracy of the relative attitude determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]