Introduction

AOS was awarded a NASA Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program in 2008. This SBIR supports Automated Rendezvous and Docking (AR&D) risk reduction activities for the NASA Orion vehicle. Specifically this SBIR topic is designed to develop technology to process imagery from a centerline (boresight) camera onboard the Orion vehicle. Astronauts will use centerlines camera data to dock to the International Space Station (ISS). AOS proposed to apply ULTOR® Passive Pose and Position Engine technology to process the centerline camera imagery in real-time and provide relative navigation information to aid Orion astronauts during docking and to support future unmanned docking.
   

Phase I

AOS developed a digital simulation of the ULTOR® P3E process and collected several imagery sets of the current space shuttle docking with the ISS. The shuttle uses a centerline camera much like that planned for Orion. One of the key successes of the Phase I work was a demonstration of ULTOR® P3E producing full 6Dof measurements at ranges from the ISS greater than 200 meters. ULTOR® P3E is capable of identifying features on object in the field of view of the sensor. Object features grow in the field of view and eventually out of the field of view as the shuttle approaches the ISS. The ULTOR® P3E process is designed to take advantage of this progressive detail. This means that the features that ULTOR® P3E uses to measure 6DOF can change as the range to station closes. At roughly 50 meters from the ISS, the dominate feature that ULTOR® P3E uses for 6DOF is the same “visual docking target” that the current shuttle pilots use for manual docking.

ISS Docking Port

Visual Docking Target

ULTOR® P3E Digital Simulation

Phase II

Leveraging the success of the Phase I project, AOS was awarded a Phase II program from NASA/JSC to continue the development of using ULTOR® P3E to process centerline camera imagery for Orion. In Phase II, AOS will develop hardware similar in architecture to the planned Orion Vision Processing Unit (VPU). The ULTOR® P3E process will be ported to the hardware in preparation for a full Hardware-In-The-Loop test of performance at an Orion approved testing facility. AOS will develop a mockup of the docking port and targets currently on the ISS port used for shuttle docking. The test objectives for Phase II include:

• Verify full 6DOF measurements beyond 20 meters (current Orion AR&D requirement)
• Test ULTOR® P3E performance in VPU equivalent hardware
• Success HWIL test using ULTOR® P3E 6DOFnavigational information
• ULTOR® P3E 6DOF accuracy within Orion specifications for approach to ISS