Performance Analysis of Three Cost Policies for The Control of a Camera in Relative Circumnavigation Scenarios

In this paper, we address the relative navigation problem of a chaser circumnavigating a target. The chaser has an on-board camera and observes a set of features on the target; the goal is to obtain a detailed map of the landmarks. By controlling the yaw-rotation of the sensor it is possible to maximize the time allocated to landmark observation. An Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) provides state uncertainty information, which can then be used to design a cost function to be minimized by the optimal yaw controller. Three different cost functions are designed and simulated, and their performances are compared with the case of a fixed, nadir-pointing camera. The analysis of localization uncertainties for different sets of initial conditions confirmed the superior performance of the proposed novel control methodology.