Analysis and Validation of a Vision-Based Pose Initialization Algorithm for Non-Cooperative Spacecrafts

The thesis addresses the issue of monocular relative pose determination for non-cooperative spacecrafts. An algorithm, called SVD method, is described and its peculiarities are discussed. The SVD technique is implemented both on a dataset of synthetic imagery of PRISMA mission's Tango spacecraft and on a dataset of real images of a CubeSat mock-up. The results are, then, analyzed so to highlight the fundamental limitations and the optimal operative range for the SVD architecture.