Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations

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4 papers in the last four weeks, up 33% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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Monocular Navigation Relative to Unknown Spacecraft Using a Transformer-Aided Kalman Filter
Oct 5, 2026Pol Francesch Huc, Simone D'AmicoKalman Filtering Relative Pose Estimation
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305
Spacecraft Rendezvous Trajectory Generation with Modular Constraints via Diffusion Model Composition
Oct 5, 2026Mariko A. Storey-Matsutani, Richard LinaresConstrained Generative Modeling Trajectory Generation
Graduate Student, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Cambridge MA · Associate Professor, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Cambridge MA
OrbitTAMP: Grounding Language Models for Task and Motion Planning in Spacecraft Rendezvous
Oct 1, 2026Yuji Takubo, Daniele Gammelli, Marco Pavone +1LLM Planning Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA · Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA · Italian Institute of Artificial Intelligence (AI4I), Turin, Italy +1
Control Barrier Functions for Safe Free-Flying Robotic Spacecraft Operations in Tumbling Target Capture
Sep 22, 2026Alexander Meinert, Peter Stadler, Niklas Baldauf +1Space Robotics Safety-Critical Control
Space Applications Group, e:fs TechHub GmbH, Gaimersheim, Germany · Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Ingolstadt University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Transformer-Informed Trajectory Optimization for Relative Motion in Cislunar Orbits
Sep 21, 2026Walter J. Manuel, Yuji Takubo, Simone D'AmicoTrajectory Optimization Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
PINGU: Extending Air-Bearing Spacecraft Emulators with Open-Source Actuators and Learned Control for Contact-Rich Proximity Operations
Sep 20, 2026Ricard Marsal I Castan, Akiyoshi Uchida, Aman Arora +7Space Robotics Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation
University of Luxembourg · Tohoku University · Georgia Institute of Technology
SCoCaT: Success Conditioned Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Spacecraft Docking
Sep 5, 2026Aman Arora, Ricard Marsal I Castan, Matteo El-Hariry +1Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Constrained RL
SnT - Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
GPU-Accelerated Astrodynamics World Models for Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations
Sep 2, 2026Duncan Eddy, Isaac R. Ward, Grace Ra Kim +1Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations World Models
Stanford University
Genetic Fuzzy System-based Control for Final Approach of Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations
Aug 13, 2026Daegyun Choi, Donghoon Kim, Henzeh LeeghimSpacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Fuzzy Logic
PhD Student, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA. · Assistant Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA. · Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Chosun University, Gwangju 61452, South Korea.
Passively Safe Convex Guidance for Cislunar Rendezvous and Proximity Operations
Aug 4, 2026Ian M. Down, Connor Plaks, Matthew Bolliger +1Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations
Astrodynamics Engineer, Advanced Space, LLC, 1400 W 122nd Ave, Suite 200, Westminster, CO 80234 · Navigation Engineer, Advanced Space, LLC, 1400 W 122nd Ave, Suite 200, Westminster, CO 80234 · Senior Astrodynamics Engineer, Advanced Space, LLC, 1400 W 122nd Ave, Suite 200, Westminster, CO 80234 +1
AI-Augmented Model Predictive Control for Safe and Adaptive Rendezvous and Proximity Operations
Jul 18, 2026Luca Sportelli, Tyler Barr, Cagri Kilic +1Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Multi-Agent Control
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, FL 32114
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 Estimation Spacecraft 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
Spacecraft Fiducial Marker for Autonomous Rendezvous, Proximity Operations, and Docking
Jun 25, 2026Ravi Kumar Thakur, Matouš Vrba, Martin SaskaSpace Robotics Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations
Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Karlovo Namesti 13, 121 35 Prague 2, Czechia
Memory-Efficient Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Safety-Critical Control in Adversarial Spacecraft Proximity Operations
Jun 16, 2026Alejandro Posadas-Nava, Richard Linares, Minduli WijayatungaSpacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Control Barrier Functions
Researcher, AeroAstro, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. · Associate Professor and Rockwell International Career Development Professor, AeroAstro, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. · Assistant Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 104 S Wright St, Urbana, IL 61801.
Tightly-Coupled Estimation and Guidance for Robust Low-Thrust Rendezvous via Adaptive Homotopy
May 6, 2026Batu Candan, Simone ServadioTrajectory Optimization Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011.

Oct 5, 2026, cs.ROJ/K move · Enter open · S save

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

Pol Francesch Huc, Simone D'Amico

Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305

Kalman Filtering Relative Pose Estimation Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Visual Odometry Spacecraft Pose Estimation

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This work presents a novel learning-based pipeline for pose estimation of unknown spacecraft using only monocular images from a single servicer. The approach combines a transformer-based neural network with a Multi-State Constraint Kalman Filter (MSCKF) to estimate the pose (i.e., position and orientation of the target spacecraft relative to the camera) throughout rendezvous and proximity operations. Unlike existing vision-based methods that require prior knowledge of the target shape or inertia properties, rely on additional sensing modalities such as depth, lidar, or stereo, or only recover translation up to scale, the proposed pipeline generalizes to previously unseen spacecraft using a single monocular camera. The transformer network estimates the odometry, the change in pose between images up to scale, from SuperPoint features matched by LightGlue. The MSCKF uses these pseudo-measurements along with an orbit and attitude kinematics model to estimate the pose of the target. In particular, the relative orbit elements, the target's attitude with respect to the servicer's camera, and the associated angular velocity are estimated directly by the filter. Given the monocular approach and short distance to the target, the full observability of the range to the target is recovered via attitude maneuvers by the servicer. The method is trained and evaluated on a re-rendered high-resolution version of the SPE3R dataset, which includes synthetic images of 103 spacecraft. Eleven of these spacecraft are held out during training to evaluate the generalization to unseen targets. Monte Carlo simulations are then used to evaluate the navigation pipeline on rendered trajectories of the held out spacecraft. The results demonstrate that learned vision pipelines as a front-end for Kalman filters provide median errors of 3.7° in attitude and 2.2% of range in ROE when navigating about unknown targets.

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