dLITE: Differentiable Lighting-Informed Trajectory Evaluation for On-Orbit Inspection
This paper presents dLITE, a differentiable simulation pipeline for optimizing on-orbit inspection trajectories to improve image quality, addressing challenges like specular reflections and dynamic lighting in low-Earth orbit.
Why it matters
This work provides a novel computational approach to spacecraft mission planning, enabling optimization of inspection trajectories to improve data quality in challenging orbital environments.
Key Points
- 1Developed dLITE, an end-to-end differentiable simulation pipeline for on-orbit inspection operations
- 2Leverages differentiable rendering and custom orbit propagator to enable optimization of orbital parameters
- 3Enables automatic design of trajectories to improve quality and usefulness of data captured during inspection
- 4First of its kind differentiable inspection-planning pipeline, providing new insights into spacecraft mission planning
Details
The paper addresses the challenge of visual inspection of space-borne assets in low-Earth orbit, where factors like specular reflections, self-shadowing, and dynamic lighting can significantly impact the quality of data captured during inspection operations. The authors present dLITE, a differentiable simulation pipeline that leverages state-of-the-art differentiable rendering tools and a custom orbit propagator to enable end-to-end optimization of orbital parameters based on the resulting image quality. This allows for the automatic design of non-obvious trajectories that can vastly improve the quality and usefulness of the attained data, which the authors claim is the first of its kind differentiable inspection-planning pipeline.
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