抄録
This paper describes a method to determine an attitude angular velocity of an orbiting spacecraft using a commercially available small camera and computer vision technique. Employing the earth camera has a large advantage for small / nano satellites in terms of the required volume. First of all, the spacecraft takes two pictures with specified time interval. Then, we determine “fundamental matrix”, that contains camera motion information. Finally, we calculate attitude rotation occurred during the time interval from the fundamental matrix, and derive the attitude angular velocity. Considering the case of on-orbit spacecraft, translational motion information is available using GPS or orbital parameters. Thus, we also propose a method to estimate the fundamental matrix in the case stated above. Numerical simulations are conducted with two method, usual computer vision method and the proposed one. As a result, both methods reached high accuracy, in particular, proposed method is about 20% better than conventional one.
