Space Satellite Systems and Control

Latest papers

• Raw Imagery Impacting Your AI: Should You Care?

  Adrien Dorise, Marjorie Bellizzi, St\'ephane May · 1 October 2026

  Onboard AI is gaining interest for space applications such as vessel, wildfire, and cloud detection, where real-time processing can improve mission reactivity and reduce downlink needs. However, onboard models may operate on raw or minimally processed imagery rather than on restored ground products.…

• VISTA: An Attention-Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Architecture for Space Situational Awareness Sensor Tasking

  Miguel Leiva-V\'elez, Adalberto Claudio Quiros, Nicolas Gaston Rozado, Hodei Urrutxua, V\'ictor Rodr\'iguez-Fern\'andez · 22 September 2026

  The rapid growth of resident space objects is increasing the complexity of space situational awareness sensor tasking, challenging classical optimization methods as they allocate finite, heterogeneous, and distributed sensing resources across ever-larger catalogues. Existing deep reinforcement learn…

• HAT: Hypothesis-Anchored Tracking for Video Monocular Spacecraft Pose Estimation

  Andr\'e Lopo, Atabak Dehban, Rodrigo Ventura · 21 September 2026

  Monocular 6-DoF pose estimation of non-cooperative targets is important for on-orbit servicing and debris removal. A single-image estimator can confuse near-symmetric spacecraft orientations, and tracking can preserve an incorrect pose. We present Hypothesis-Anchored Tracking (HAT), a causal framewo…

• Improving Faint Object Detection for Space Situational Awareness with Variational Autoencoders

  Angela Cratere, Luca Ghilardi, Vishnu Reddy, Francesco Dell'Olio, Charalampos S. Kouzinopoulos, Roberto Furfaro · 11 September 2026

  We present a deep-learning pipeline for enhancing the detection of faint moving objects in optical space situational awareness (SSA) imagery through automated star removal and background reconstruction. Detecting low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) objects remains extremely challenging in optical observ…

• Velocity-coupled Representation Refinement for Satellite Orbit Prediction

  Yue Yang, Zhiqiang Wu, Saiyu Qi, Fan Ma · 26 August 2026

  Satellite orbit prediction, which aims to forecast future orbital trajectories from historical observations, is important for collision warning and safe space operations. With advances in time-series forecasting, learning-based methods have emerged as a promising solution for satellite prediction. I…

• Orbit-Planner: Towards Latent World Models for On-Orbit Obstacle Avoidance of Satellite Agents

  Zhijian Li, Chao Ren, Peijin Wang, Xian Sun · 18 August 2026

  Satellite agents for on-orbit navigation tasks need to predict collision risks using limited onboard observations. However, conventional planners often rely on predefined maps and fixed environmental assumptions, limiting their adaptability in dynamic on-orbit scenarios. In this paper, we propose Or…

• Satellite Trajectory Optimization via Proximal Policy Optimization for Space Debris Avoidance

  Logan Luna (Georgia Institute of Technology), Juan Ortiz Couder (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University), Raul Alejandro Vargas-Acosta (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University) · 11 August 2026

  Collision avoidance systems are commonly used to avoid fragmentation events occurring in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geosynchronous Equatorial Orbit (GEO). However, these events have been growing in frequency as orbital congestion worsens with the launch of megaconstellations. Consequently, conjunctio…

• PHOENIX: Fine-Tuned SLM-Powered Autonomous Satellite Lifetime Extension via Predictive Self-Healing and Multi-Agent AI Recovery

  Sumaiya Islam, Harsha Kumara Moraliyage · 10 August 2026

  Most CubeSats, small and low-cost satellites roughly the size of a shoebox, do not survive as long as they were designed to: a study of 178 missions found that only 48-65% remain operational after two years, against a designed lifetime of 2-5 years. The deeper issue is that a CubeSat in low Earth or…

• DreamSat-Pose: Spacecraft Pose Estimation from Single-View 3D Reconstructions and Learned 2D-3D Feature Matching

  Josiane Uwumukiza, Jocelyn Zhao, Giovanni Lavezzi, Giacomo Battaglia, Paolo Panicucci, Minduli C. Wijayatunga, Victor Rodriguez-Fernandez, Richard Linares · 16 July 2026

  6-DoF pose estimation is a critical task in autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations. In the case of an unknown target, this task becomes challenging as it shall be paired with the reconstruction of the target shape model. In this article, we propose a novel framework for single-shot shape and…

• GAP-GDRNet: Geometry-Aware Monocular Visual Pose Sensing on a Single-Target Synthetic Spacecraft Dataset

  Yonglong Zhang, Yang Liu · 3 July 2026

  Monocular relative pose sensing is a central perception problem in non-cooperative rendezvous and on-orbit servicing. In spacecraft images, however, weak surface texture, thin appendages, illumination changes, and partial occlusion often leave only sparse and unstable geometric evidence. This articl…

• Conformal Orbit-Valid Trust Horizons for Equivariant World Models

  Hongbo Wang · 25 June 2026

  Learned world models are useful only over horizons on which their rollout error remains controlled. We study trust-horizon certification for latent world models with known group symmetries. Given a one-step latent residual and a finite-time expansion estimate, we form a raw horizon curve and calibra…

• Transformer-Based Warm-Starting for Feasible and Optimal Terminal Approach to Tumbling Objects with Space Manipulators

  Yuji Takubo, Maximilian Adang, Mac Schwager, Simone D'Amico · 17 June 2026

  Real-time trajectory generation for on-orbit robotic servicing is challenging due to the nonlinear coupling between spacecraft bus motion, manipulator dynamics, visibility cone, and trajectory-level safety constraints. This paper studies learning-based warm-starting for sequential convex programming…

• Segmentation-based Detection for Efficient Multi-Task Spacecraft Perception

  Sivaperuman Muniyasamy, Surendar Devasundaram · 16 June 2026

  Vision-based perception is fundamental to Space Situational Awareness and autonomous on-orbit operations such as rendezvous, docking, servicing, and navigation. However, progress in this area is limited by the scarcity of annotated space imagery and by challenging visual-domain characteristics inclu…

• Multi-view feature High-order Fusion for Space Weak Object Detection and Segmentation

  Weilong Guo, Yuhan Sun, Shengyang Li · 16 June 2026

  Weak objects are common in images and videos of space applications. However, it is hard to learn proper representations from their limited appearance information. Inspired by multi-view learning, we develop simple multi-view attentions, treating their outputs as multi-view features. We also propose …

• Post-Launch Capability Expansion of Vision-Language Models via Prompting for On-Orbit Spacecraft Inspection

  Nicholas A. Welsh, Lennon J. Shikhman, Monty Nehru Attazs, Seemanthini K. Putane, Van Minh Nguyen, Ryan T. White · 16 June 2026

  Spaceborne inspection systems often deploy perception models prior to launch, after which updating model weights or expanding fixed label sets becomes operationally impractical. While supervised models can be integrated pre-flight, adding new semantic capabilities in orbit requires retraining and re…

• Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer for Spacecraft 6D Pose Estimation

  Zongwu Xie, Yifan Yang, Yonglong Zhang, Guanghu Xie, Yang Liu, Shuo Zhang · 11 June 2026

  Vision sensors provide a lightweight solution for spacecraft proximity operations, but monocular spacecraft 6D pose estimation remains difficult under illumination variation, specular reflection, shadowing, weak texture, and background interference. These factors make local visual evidence spatially…

• Quantifying Uncertainty in Space Debris Capture with Active Tether-Net Systems Caused by Noisy Observations

  Feng Liu, Achira Boonrath, Eleonora M. Botta, Souma Chowdhury · 9 June 2026

  As Low Earth Orbit has grown more crowded with space debris, the need for reliable and efficient debris removal solutions becomes more urgent. An active tether-net system with maneuverable units is one of the promising solutions to this problem, whose success is dependent on the robustness of the ne…

• TinyML-Driven Cybersecurity for Autonomous Spacecraft: Latency-Accuracy Analysis for SPARTA RF and Cyber Threat Detection

  Van Le, Trevor Tran, Tan Le · 5 June 2026

  Autonomous spacecraft require rapid, lightweight, and reliable onboard detection of cyber-RF threats. Using the SPARTA attack model, we analyze the latency-accuracy trade-offs of TinyML-compatible classical models -- Random Forest, Logistic Regression, SVM, and MLP -- for detecting uplink jamming, F…

• GABI: Geometry-Aware Boundary Integration for Spacecraft Segmentation

  Iason Georgios Velentzas, Dhruv Ahuja, Panagiotis Tsiotras · 2 June 2026

  Accurate segmentation is crucial for autonomous spacecraft, as it directly affects downstream tasks related to 3D situational awareness. The harsh illumination conditions of space, however, produce images with high variability in appearance, hindering the generalization of segmentation approaches ac…

• Collaborative Space Object Detection with Multi-Satellite Viewpoints in LEO Constellations

  Xingyu Qu, Wenxuan Zhang, Peng Hu · 2 June 2026

  With the growing number of satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations, the near-Earth space environment has become increasingly congested, making space object detection (SOD) a pressing challenge for space safety and sustainability. To mitigate collision risks and ensure the continuity of sp…

• TALON: Token-Aligned Lightweight Adapters for 6-DoF Spacecraft Pose Estimation

  Abid Ali, Arunkumar Rathinam, Djamila Aouada · 1 June 2026

  Monocular 6-DoF spacecraft pose estimation methods predominantly process individual frames, discarding the temporal information present in an image sequence acquired during spacecraft manoeuvres. Few temporal approaches require full backbone fine-tuning or auxiliary optical flow networks, risking ca…

• Designing Active Tether-Net Systems for Space Debris Capture with Graph-Learning-Aided Mixed-Combinatorial Optimization

  Feng Liu, Achira Boonrath, Gishnu Madhu, Eleonora M. Botta, Souma Chowdhury · 29 May 2026

  Active tether-net systems are a promising solution for capturing large non-cooperative targets, such as space debris, by deploying a flexible net manipulated by maneuverable units (MUs). However, concurrent systematic explorations of design and control choices of the tether-net system to understand …

• AstroMind: A High-Fidelity Benchmark for Spacecraft Behavior Reasoning Based on Large Language Models

  Hao Liu, Siyuan Yang, Qinglei Hu, Dongyu Li · 26 May 2026

  Understanding why a spacecraft maneuvers -- rather than simply that it did -- is an increasingly important problem for space domain awareness as Earth orbits grow crowded and contested. Current analysis pipelines are built for detection: they are good at picking up that something happened, less good…

• Component-Aware Structure-Preserving Style Transfer for Satellite Visual Sim2Real Data Construction

  Zongwu Xie, Yonglong Zhang, Yifan Yang, Yang Liu, Baoshi Cao · 21 May 2026

  For camera-based satellite visual sensing, Sim2Real data construction requires images that approach real-domain sensor appearance while retaining the annotations inherited from simulation. Real sensor images of satellite targets with reliable pose labels and component-level masks are difficult to ac…

• CAD-Free Learning of Spacecraft Pose Estimators via NeRF-Based Augmentations

  Antoine Legrand, Renaud Detry, Christophe De Vleeschouwer · 20 May 2026

  Spacecraft pose estimation networks require tens of thousands of CAD-rendered images to be trained. This reliance on synthetic CAD data (i) limits applicability to targets with reliable geometry prior, excluding uncooperative or poorly documented spacecraft, and (ii) causes poor generalization to re…