Spacecraft Pose Estimation

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Overview

The field estimates a spacecraft’s six-degree-of-freedom pose relative to a camera or another vehicle, often when the target is uncooperative and its geometry is unknown. Methods use monocular or stereo images, depth and LiDAR, or event cameras, with approaches including keypoint and heatmap networks, geometric feature matching with Perspective-n-Point solvers, and temporal tracking or Kalman filtering. Researchers train and evaluate systems on benchmarks such as SPEED+, SPADES, and SwissCube, using synthetic data, sim-to-real adaptation, and increasingly diverse multimodal datasets. Accuracy is improving, but generalization to unseen spacecraft, difficult lighting, small components, symmetry, and tracking drift remains challenging, alongside the need for efficient onboard inference.

Latest papers

CardsList

19 papers3 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Polarity--Time Interaction and Multi-Level Reliability for Event-Based Spacecraft Pose Estimation

    Oct 27, 2026Yonglong Zhang, Zongwu Xie, Yang LiuSpacecraft Pose EstimationCamera Pose Estimation

  2. Recurrent Vision Transformers for Event-Based Spacecraft Pose Estimation Under Slow Relative Motions

    Oct 19, 2026Sofia McLeod, Mohsi Jawaid, Carl Seubert +1Spacecraft Pose EstimationEvent-Based Vision

    AI for Space Group, Adelaide University · Australasian Space Innovation Institute

  3. Spacecraft Pose Tracking via Kinematic Prediction and Selective Event Correction

    Oct 14, 2026Yonglong Zhang, Guanning Yao, Shuo Zhang +3Spacecraft Pose EstimationEvent-Based Vision

    All authors are with the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, Heilongjiang, China.

  4. Monocular Navigation Relative to Unknown Spacecraft Using a Transformer-Aided Kalman Filter

    Oct 5, 2026Pol Francesch Huc, Simone D'AmicoKalman FilteringRelative Pose Estimation

    Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305

  5. Vision Foundation Models with Synthetic-Only Training for Monocular Spacecraft Pose Estimation

    Sep 22, 2026John Church, Vazghen NikolianVision Foundation Model AdaptationObject Pose Estimation

    Both authors contributed equally to this work; author order is alphabetical.

  6. HAT: Hypothesis-Anchored Tracking for Video Monocular Spacecraft Pose Estimation

    Sep 18, 2026André Lopo, Atabak Dehban, Rodrigo VenturaObject Pose EstimationSpacecraft Pose Estimation

    ISR, Instituto Superior T´ecnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

  7. DreamSat-Bench: Development and Initial Testing of a Testbed for AI-Based Pose Estimation from 3D Reconstruction

    Sep 12, 2026Alex Posadas-Nava, August Berne, Giovanni Lavezzi +8Spacecraft Pose EstimationSpacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Politecnico di Milano · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign +1

  8. DreamSat-Pose: Spacecraft Pose Estimation from Single-View 3D Reconstructions and Learned 2D-3D Feature Matching

    Jul 15, 2026Josiane Uwumukiza, Jocelyn Zhao, Giovanni Lavezzi +5Relative Pose EstimationSpacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations

    Undergraduate Student, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, USA · Undergraduate Student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA · Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA +5

  9. GAP-GDRNet: Geometry-aware monocular 6D pose estimation for spacecraft using synthetic geometric supervision

    Jul 2, 2026Zongwu Xie, Yonglong Zhang, Yifan Yang +2Object Pose EstimationSpacecraft Pose Estimation

    State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, Heilongjiang, China

  10. Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer for Spacecraft 6D Pose Estimation

    Jun 10, 2026Zongwu Xie, Yifan Yang, Yonglong Zhang +3Vision TransformerObject Pose Estimation

    School of Mechatronics Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China

  11. TALON: Token-Aligned Lightweight Adapters for 6-DoF Spacecraft Pose Estimation

    May 29, 2026Abid Ali, Nidhal Eddine Chenni, Arunkumar Rathinam +1Vision Foundation Model AdaptationObject Pose Estimation

  12. CAD-Free Learning of Spacecraft Pose Estimators via NeRF-Based Augmentations

    May 19, 2026Antoine Legrand, Renaud Detry, Christophe De VleeschouwerSynthetic-to-Real Domain AdaptationSynthetic Data Augmentation

    Department of Electrical Engineering (ELEN), ICTEAM, UCLouvain · Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven · Aerospacelab +1

  13. Component-Aware Structure-Preserving Style Transfer for Satellite Visual Sim2Real Data Construction

    May 19, 2026Zongwu Xie, Yonglong Zhang, Yifan Yang +2Synthetic-to-Real Domain AdaptationSynthetic Data Generation

    State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, Heilongjiang, China

  14. Cross-Modal RGB-D Fusion Transformer for 6D Pose Estimation of Non-Cooperative Spacecraft with Stereo-Derived Depth

    May 9, 2026Yongliang Zhen, Bo LÜ, Hang Yang +1Object Pose EstimationStereo Matching

    School of Physics, Northeast Normal University, Changchun 130024, China · Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, Changchun 130033, China

  15. Efficient Onboard Spacecraft Pose Estimation with Event Cameras and Neuromorphic Hardware

    Apr 5, 2026Arunkumar Rathinam, Jules Lecomte, Jost Reelsen +3Spacecraft Pose EstimationRelative Pose Estimation

    University of Luxembourg · Fortiss GmbH, Munich, Germany · Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany +1

  16. Online Inertia Tensor Identification for Non-Cooperative Spacecraft via Augmented UKF

    Mar 28, 2026Batu Candan, Simone ServadioSpacecraft Pose EstimationUnscented Kalman Filtering

    Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA, 50011.

  17. Unified Orbit-Attitude Estimation and Sensor Tasking Framework for Autonomous Cislunar Space Domain Awareness Using Multiplicative Unscented Kalman Filter

    Mar 21, 2026Smriti Nandan Paul, Siwei FanSpace Situational AwarenessSpacecraft Pose Estimation

    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, 65409, MO, United States · Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, 3700 Willow Creek Rd, Prescott, 86301, AZ, United States

  18. Current state of the multi-agent multi-view experimental and digital twin rendezvous (MMEDR-Autonomous) framework

    Mar 21, 2026Logan Banker, Michael Wozniak, Mohanad Alameer +6Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity OperationsRL Control

    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, 65409, MO, United States · Purdue University, 610 Purdue Mall, West Lafayette, 47907, USA

  19. SpaceSense-Bench: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Benchmark for Spacecraft Perception and Pose Estimation

    Mar 10, 2026Aodi Wu, Jianhong Zuo, Zeyuan Zhao +3Robotic PerceptionSpacecraft Pose Estimation

    University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China