Spacecraft Pose Tracking via Kinematic Prediction and Selective Event Correction

Reliable relative pose estimation is a key enabler for autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations, yet space imagery is notoriously challenging due to extreme illumination, high contrast, and fast target motion. Event cameras provide asynchronous, change-driven measurements that can remain informative when frame-based imagery saturates or blurs, while neuromorphic processors can exploit sparse activations for low-latency, energy-efficient inferences. This paper presents a spacecraft 6-DoF pose-estimation pipeline that couples event-based vision with the BrainChip Akida neuromorphic processor. Using the SPADES dataset, we train compact MobileNet-style keypoint regression networks on lightweight event-frame representations, apply quantization-aware training (8/4-bit), and convert the models to Akida-compatible spiking neural networks. We benchmark three event representations and demonstrate real-time, low-power inference on Akida V1 hardware. We additionally design a heatmap-based model targeting Akida V2 and evaluate it on Akida Cloud, yielding improved pose accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end demonstration of spacecraft pose estimation running on Akida hardware, highlighting a practical route to low-latency, low-power perception for future autonomous space missions.

Sparse event responses produce uneven keypoint errors whose effects on spacecraft pose depend on correspondence geometry and the reliability of successive observations. We present a reliability-aware framework connecting polarity--time localization, geometric recovery, event--CAD refinement, and trajectory optimization. A three-branch representation combines positive events, negative events, and recent-event timing through cross-branch attention and gating, followed by spatiotemporal aggregation. An ordered semantic-point head estimates relative correspondence precision for geometrically constrained pose recovery. Event-edge and CAD-projection agreement then guide local pose refinement under keypoint-geometry safeguards. At the sequence level, a ten-dimensional descriptor combines heatmap shape, reprojection consistency, and geometric conditioning to set time-aligned observation scales. On the official SPADES challenge test set, the complete system achieves a combined pose score of 0.0474, approximately 5.4% below PASAN+IRIS. Validation ablations reduce the score from 0.0772 for base localization with uniform PnP to 0.0514 for the complete cascade; on identical single-frame observations, quality weighting reduces the score from 0.0549 with constant-weight optimization to 0.0514.

Long-horizon spacecraft trajectory forecasting suffers from error accumulation due to the absence of corrective observations in the forecast regime, making reliable uncertainty estimation crucial for safety-critical decision-making such as space domain awareness and conjunction assessment. While high-fidelity physics-based orbit propagators provide accurate deterministic forecasts, they typically lack calibrated uncertainty estimates over long horizons. We introduce a Predictor--Corrector framework in which a physics-based continuous-time $\textit{deterministic}$ forecaster is augmented with a learned continuous-time $\textit{probabilistic}$ Corrector that models forecast errors. The proposed Corrector can be wrapped around an existing deterministic propagator to improve forecast accuracy while producing sharp and calibrated full-covariance uncertainty estimates. The Corrector is based on Latent Neural Controlled Differential Equations (Latent NCDEs) and models the probabilistic temporal evolution of forecast errors in continuous time, naturally supporting irregular sampling and missing features. We further introduce a loss function that promotes calibration and sharpness in long-horizon uncertainty propagation. We evaluate the proposed framework on long-horizon spacecraft trajectory forecasting using real-world data from NASA's Crustal Dynamics Data Information System (CDDIS), wrapping the Corrector around NASA's General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT). Across forecast horizons of 2--4 days without observations and six rolling test windows, the proposed approach consistently improves accuracy and uncertainty calibration compared to deterministic baselines and Latent ODE-based correctors, demonstrating the effectiveness of the continuous-time probabilistic Corrector for trajectory forecasting.