Target Track Pulse Scheduling

The problem of scheduling radar tracking pulses in a dense target environment where the position estimation error must be constrained to avoid false return with track correlations is considered. The problem is to schedule n fixed energy pulses such that the rangerate error is minimized at some final time subject to the constraint that the position error will be smaller than some value for the whole time interval. For a fixed time interval, the problem of finding the minimum number of radar measurements required to satisfy the position estimation error constraint is solved. A closed-form solution for the optimum schedule is given in the case where the number of pulses is equal to the minimum number of pulses. For cases where one extra pulse is available, a solution method is described and an algorithm is derived.     

Robotic vision technology for space station and satellite applications

This paper presents the robotic vision technologies newly developed for satellites and space station robotic applications at the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Laboratory of the University of Waterloo and at the Vision, Intelligence and Robotics Technologies Corp. (VIRTEK). The first part of the paper presents how the PAMI-VIRTEK Vision technologies are engineered to support the STEAR (Space Station, Strategic Technologies in Automation and Robotics Program) sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency. The second describes the use of stereo CCD camera for sensing the deformed shape of a third generation satellite. It addresses the notion of shape interpolation and error reduction.