Space is a messy place. Anestimated 34,000 pieces of junk over 10 cm in diameter are currently orbiting Earth at around10 times the speed of a bullet. If one of them hits a spacecraft, the damage could be disastrous.

In September, the International Space Station had to dodge an unknown piece of debris. With the volume of space trash rapidly growing, the chances of acollision are increasing.

TheEuropean Space Agency(ESA) wants to clean up some of the mess with the help of AI. In 2025, it plans to launch the worlds first debris-removing space mission:ClearSpace-1.

The technology is being developed by Swiss startup ClearSpace, a spin-off from the Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL). Their removal target isthe now-obsolete Vespa Upper Part, a 100 kg payload adaptor orbiting 660 km above the Earth.

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ClearSpace-1 will use an AI-powered camera to find the debris. Its robotic arms will then grab the object and drag it back to the atmosphere before burning it up.

A central focus is to develop deep learning algorithms to reliably estimate the 6D pose (three rotations and three translations) of the target from video-sequences even though images taken in space are difficult, said Mathieu Salzmann, an EPFLscientist spearheading the project. They can be over- or under-exposed with many mirror-like surfaces.

Vespa hasnt been seen for seven years, so EPFL will use a database of synthetic images to simulate its current appearance as training material for the algorithms.

Once the mission begins, theresearchers will capture real-life pictures from beyond the Earths atmosphere to finetune the AI system. The algorithms also need tobe transferred to a dedicated hardware platform onboard the capture satellite.

Since motion in space is well behaved, the pose estimation algorithms can fill the gaps between recognitions spaced one second apart, alleviating the computational pressure, saidProfessor David Atienza, head of ESL.

However, to ensure that they can autonomously cope with all the uncertainties in the mission, the algorithms are so complex that their implementation requires squeezing out all the performance from the platform resources.

If the capture is successful, it could pave the way for further debris-removal missions that can make space a safer place.

Published October 30, 2020 17:27 UTC

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