ROBOTIC VISION SYSTEM

ZAI has designed, developed, and patented an automated robotic vision system. The system uses two light sources and a digital camera mounted co-linearly on a platform. It is very simple and inexpensive to operate. Capturing 30 frames per second, the system forms two images for each frame. One image is a standard TV image in a raster format. The second simultaneous image has exactly the same image data. This data however, is encoded differently. The ranges to the objects at each pixel within the frame are encoded in the intensity of the image on a pixel-by-pixel basis forming a three-dimensional range map.

PROPOSED APPLICATION: AUTONOMOUS DOCKING OF NASA SPACECRAFT WITH SATELLITE
This novel 3-D robotic vision technology has been proposed to NASA as a system for the autonomous docking of a spacecraft with a satellite. The system is designed to be implemented with a small micro-controller and an 8-bit digital CCD TV camera. It will establish an exact three dimensional range map at 30 frames per second from all possible ranges and aspect conditions out to 100 feet. Prior to docking operations, a collection of apriori images of the target satellite will be collected and processed. This process normally requires a very large data set, but ZAI has developed several successful heuristic methods to greatly reduce the magnitude of the stored data. While the actual proposal is for imaging individual satellites, a more general option is a standard marking and reference scheme that can be applied identically to all satellites.