SpaceYOLO: A Human-Inspired Model for Real-time, On-board Spacecraft Feature Detection

The rapid proliferation of non-cooperative spacecraft and space debris in orbit has precipitated a surging demand for on-orbit servicing and space debris removal at a scale that only autonomous missions can address, but the prerequisite autonomous navigation and flightpath planning to safely capture an unknown, non-cooperative, tumbling space object is an open problem. This requires algorithms for real-time, automated spacecraft feature recognition to pinpoint the locations of collision hazards (e.g. solar panels or antennas) and safe docking features (e.g. satellite bodies or thrusters) so safe, effective flightpaths can be planned. Prior work in this area reveals the performance of computer vision models are highly dependent on the training dataset and its coverage of scenarios visually similar to the real scenarios that occur in deployment. Hence, the algorithm may have degraded performance under certain lighting conditions even when the rendezvous maneuver conditions of the chaser to the target spacecraft are the same. This work delves into how humans perform these tasks through a survey of how aerospace engineering students experienced with spacecraft shapes and components recognize features of the three spacecraft: Landsat, Envisat, Anik, and the orbiter Mir. The survey reveals that the most common patterns in the human detection process were to consider the shape and texture of the features: antennas, solar panels, thrusters, and satellite bodies. This work introduces a novel algorithm SpaceYOLO, which fuses a state-of-the-art object detector YOLOv5 with a separate neural network based on these human-inspired decision processes exploiting shape and texture. Performance in autonomous spacecraft detection of SpaceYOLO is compared to ordinary YOLOv5 in hardware-in-the-loop experiments under different lighting and chaser maneuver conditions at the ORION Laboratory at Florida Tech.