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Precise monocular vision-based pose measurement system for lunar surface sampling manipulator

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Abstract

Space manipulator has been playing an increasingly important role in space exploration due to its flexibility and versatility. This paper is to design a vision-based pose measurement system for a four-degree-of-freedom (4-DOF) lunar surface sampling manipulator relying on a monitoring camera and several fiducial markers. The system first employs double plateaus histogram equalization for the markers to improve the robustness to varying noise and illumination. The markers are then accurately extracted in sub-pixel based on template matching and curved surface fitting. Finally, given the camera parameters and 3D reference points, the pose of the manipulator end-effector is solved from the 3D-to-2D point correspondences by combining a plane-based pose estimation method with rigid-body transformation. Experiment results show that the system achieves high-precision positioning and orientation performance. The measurement error is within 3 mm in position, and 0.2° in orientation, meeting the requirements for space manipulator operations.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11727804, 11872070), and the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 2019JJ50732).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Gang Wang, ZhongChen Shi, Yang Shang, XiaoLiang Sun, WenLong Zhang & QiFeng Yu

  2. Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Image Measurement and Vision Navigation, Changsha, 410073, China

    Gang Wang, ZhongChen Shi, Yang Shang, XiaoLiang Sun, WenLong Zhang & QiFeng Yu

Authors
  1. Gang Wang
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  2. ZhongChen Shi
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  3. Yang Shang
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  4. XiaoLiang Sun
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  5. WenLong Zhang
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Correspondence to Yang Shang.

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Wang, G., Shi, Z., Shang, Y. et al. Precise monocular vision-based pose measurement system for lunar surface sampling manipulator. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 62, 1783–1794 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-019-9518-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-019-9518-8

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