Abstract: Estimating the relative poses of satellites to spacecrafts is a supporting technology in many space manipulation activities. Addressing the single light source in the space and the lightreflecting surfaces of the satellites, a novel binocular method is proposed for satellite pose estimation in this paper. When the panel landmarks of the satellites can be observed, the proposed method uses the outer docking rings and the panel landmarks for pose estimation, and otherwise, the ORB features are used to measure the satellite poses. In addition, the opticalflow tracker and the Kalman filter are used to optimize the estimation results for improving the robustness of the proposed method. Simulation results demonstrate that this method can calculate the relative poses of the satellites accurately in the singlelightsource space.

Key words: satellites, docking, binocular vision, pose measurement