Juan Ignacio Bravo Pérez-Villar

Juan Ignacio Bravo Pérez-Villar, Álvaro García-Martín, Jesús Bescós

Spacecraft pose estimation is a key task to enable space missions in which two spacecrafts must navigate around each other. Current state-of-the-art algorithms for pose estimation employ data-driven techniques. However, there is an absence of real training data for spacecraft imaged in space conditions due to the costs and difficulties associated with the space environment. This has motivated the introduction of 3D data simulators, solving the issue of data availability but introducing a large gap between the training (source) and test (target) domains. We explore a method that incorporates 3D structure into the spacecraft pose estimation pipeline to provide robustness to intensity domain shift and we present an algorithm for unsupervised domain adaptation with robust pseudo-labelling. Our solution has ranked second in the two categories of the 2021 Pose Estimation Challenge organised by the European Space Agency and the Stanford University, achieving the lowest average error over the two categories.

Javier Montalvo, Juan Ignacio Bravo Pérez-Villar, Álvaro García-Martín et al.

The scarcity of data acquired under actual space operational conditions poses a significant challenge for developing learning-based visual navigation algorithms crucial for autonomous spacecraft navigation. This data shortage is primarily due to the prohibitive costs and inherent complexities of space operations. While existing datasets, predominantly relying on computer-simulated data, have partially addressed this gap, they present notable limitations. Firstly, these datasets often utilize proprietary image generation tools, restricting the evaluation of navigation methods in novel, unseen scenarios. Secondly, they provide limited ground-truth data, typically focusing solely on the spacecraft's translation and rotation relative to the camera. To address these limitations, we present SPIN (SPacecraft Imagery for Navigation), an open-source spacecraft image generation tool designed to support a wide range of visual navigation scenarios in space, with a particular focus on relative navigation tasks. SPIN provides multiple modalities of ground-truth data and allows researchers to employ custom 3D models of satellites, define specific camera-relative poses, and adjust settings such as camera parameters or environmental illumination conditions. We also propose a method for exploiting our tool as a data augmentation module. We validate our tool on the spacecraft pose estimation task by training with a SPIN-generated replica of SPEED+, reaching a 47% average error reduction on SPEED+ testbed data (that simulates realistic space conditions), further reducing it to a 60% error reduction when using SPIN as a data augmentation method. Both the SPIN tool (and source code) and our SPIN-generated version of SPEED+ will be publicly released upon paper acceptance on GitHub. https://github.com/vpulab/SPIN