The spheres vertigo goggles: an overview of vision-based navigation research results from the international space station

The Synchronized Position Hold Engage Reorient Experimental Satellites (SPHERES) are an experimental testbed for guidance, navigation and control algorithms that has been operated, by astronauts, inside the crew volume of the International Space Station (ISS) since 2006. In October 2012, the MIT Space Systems Laboratory and Aurora Flight Sciences launched a vision based navigation upgrade to the SPHERES satellites, known as the Goggles, as part of the Visual Estimation and Relative Tracking for Inspection of Generic Objects (VERTIGO) Program. The VERTIGO Goggles successfully performed a number of vision-based navigation research experiments onboard the ISS. This included camera calibration, visual-inertial circumnavigation and stereo visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for spinning and tumbling objects. To the best of the author’s knowledge, these tests are the first time a SLAM algorithm has been run onboard a platform in space. This paper summarizes a few of the key research highlights of the VERTIGO program.