Irene Caracciolo
Visual-based Navigation with AI for satellite pose estimation.
Rel. Fabrizio Stesina, Maurizio Fantino, Stefano Bergia. Politecnico di Torino, Master of science program in Aerospace Engineering, 2026
|
Preview |
PDF (Tesi_di_laurea)
- Thesis
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (29MB) | Preview |
Abstract
The rapid growth of the space market is introducing many technical challenges in ensuring the long-term sustainability of the orbital environment and mission safety. Many solutions are being investigated, ranging from on-orbit servicing to active space debris removal, increasing the need for reliable and robust relative navigation systems. In particular, accurate monocular 6-DoF pose estimation of spacecraft represents a key enabling capability for future proximity operations. This thesis investigates learning-based monocular vision approaches for spacecraft pose estimation under realistic illumination conditions and domain shifts. The study is conducted using the SPEED+ benchmark dataset, which combines large-scale synthetic imagery with Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) acquisitions, enabling systematic evaluation across synthetic-to-real transitions.
The work focuses on keypoint-based indirect pipelines, where neural networks are employed to localise 2D projections of known 3D spacecraft landmarks, and the full relative pose is recovered through geometric Perspective-n-Point (PnP) solvers
Relators
Academic year
Publication type
Number of Pages
Course of studies
Classe di laurea
Aziende collaboratrici
URI
![]() |
Modify record (reserved for operators) |
