Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The proposed project will develop novel approaches to intelligent real-time tracking of spacecraft and similarobjects using active LIDAR sensors. In recent decades, active sensors have become an alternative toconventional CCD cameras, avoiding the need for extensive ground support and pre-flight planning. Ourcollaboration between researchers at Ryerson University, the Canadian Space Agency, and Neptec DesignGroup will address several operational and algorithmic challenges that currently hamper LIDAR systems. Newtechnologies developed under this program will be tested on Neptec's TriDAR tracking system. Theseinnovations will improve system performance, increase reliability and expand the range of TriDAR industrialapplications. Immune to variable ambient lighting conditions, self-illuminating active sensors scan an objectwith a laser beam and deliver 3D range data for pose estimation. Active sensors are particularly useful forclose-range operations between spacecraft. Sensors of this type can measure relative position, orientation andspeed.The key goals of the project are: Goal 1 - the application of algebraic constraint analysis to (a) aid missionplanners in the selection of productive scanning area and patterns, and (b) provide a consistent real-timeassessment of tracking accuracy; and Goal 2 - the development of motion-accommodating pose estimationbased on Kalman Filtering (KF) and other signal processing techniques to propagate pose when (a) fast motionmay be involved, and (b) static tracking accuracy, as referred to in Goal 1, is limited. The proposed project willcontribute to HQP training and will increase the involvement of Canadian post-secondary institutions inadvanced science and technology research areas of interest to the Canadian Space Program. The developedinfrastructure will attract researches from other universities across the Great Toronto Area giving possibility toobtain real range data to validate the performance computer vision algorithms.