The prognosticated increase in space debris poses a major issue for the future of space flight. Therefore, research in the field of on-orbit servicing has intensified over the last years. The controlled approach to a target object depicts a major part of these missions. To support the control algorithms or human teleoperators in such a task, it can be helpful to record the pose and the geometry of the object digitally, to reconstruct it three-dimensionally.
For the 3D-reconstruction of unknown, uncooperative objects, a vast number of tracking and mapping algorithms is freely available. The development of a flexible softwareframework, which allows to test various tracking and mapping algorithms, was already established in a previous. It was determined that not only the algorithms, but also the prevalent surrounding factors have an effect on the reconstruction quality.
To quantify the effect of such surrounding factors, also called influence factors, a module based metric was developed in the course of this work. It is assumed that a flawed trajectory is the most detrimental influence to the 3D-reconstruction quality. Therefore, the metric only assesses the trajectory estimated by the tracking algorithm.
In order to validate the metric and compare the different influence factors among each other, comprehensive test series were conducted at the RACOON-Lab of the TU Munich and the EPOS-system of the DLR.
At the RACOON-Lab, the generation of a complete ground truth trajectory could not be realized so far. Therefore, the metric relies on circle fit algorithms to evaluate the quality of the estimated trajectory, even without a ground truth trajectory.
Special attention is paid to the comprehensive description of the RACOON-Lab and the EPOS-system. Finally, both HIL-Systems were compared with one each other, to offer participants of future cooperation projects between the DLR and the TUM a general knowledge about the abilities of the systems.
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The prognosticated increase in space debris poses a major issue for the future of space flight. Therefore, research in the field of on-orbit servicing has intensified over the last years. The controlled approach to a target object depicts a major part of these missions. To support the control algorithms or human teleoperators in such a task, it can be helpful to record the pose and the geometry of the object digitally, to reconstruct it three-dimensionally.
For the 3D-reconstruction of unknown...
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