Efficient Onboard Spacecraft Pose Estimation with Event Cameras and Neuromorphic Hardware

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a real-time, low-power spacecraft pose estimation system using event cameras and neuromorphic hardware, enabling efficient autonomous space operations.

Contribution

It introduces an end-to-end pipeline coupling event-based vision with neuromorphic processors for spacecraft pose estimation, a novel application in space robotics.

Findings

Achieved real-time, low-power inference on Akida hardware.

Compared three event representations, with improved accuracy on Akida V2.

First demonstration of spacecraft pose estimation on neuromorphic hardware.

Abstract

Reliable relative pose estimation is a key enabler for autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations, yet space imagery is notoriously challenging due to extreme illumination, high contrast, and fast target motion. Event cameras provide asynchronous, change-driven measurements that can remain informative when frame-based imagery saturates or blurs, while neuromorphic processors can exploit sparse activations for low-latency, energy-efficient inferences. This paper presents a spacecraft 6-DoF pose-estimation pipeline that couples event-based vision with the BrainChip Akida neuromorphic processor. Using the SPADES dataset, we train compact MobileNet-style keypoint regression networks on lightweight event-frame representations, apply quantization-aware training (8/4-bit), and convert the models to Akida-compatible spiking neural networks. We benchmark three event representations and demonstrate real-time, low-power inference on Akida V1 hardware. We additionally design a heatmap-based model targeting Akida V2 and evaluate it on Akida Cloud, yielding improved pose accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end demonstration of spacecraft pose estimation running on Akida hardware, highlighting a practical route to low-latency, low-power perception for future autonomous space missions.