CVPR Daily - Thursday

aligned. Of course, ESA is one of the big space agencies, so they pollute, and now they want to find a solution. But there are also initiatives like this in the US with NASA. I think it’s pretty equal. I just read that they found debris on Mars from a previous mission. Yeah, there is debris everywhere. We’re now focusing on the Earth’s orbit but could go further in the long run. So, you’re not looking for Laika yet? No, we’re not going for Laika! [ he laughs ] Where is computer vision most important in your activity? Because we can’t communicate in real-time with the satellites, we need to understand where the debris is, its relative position, and its orientation with respect to the capture system in an autonomous fashion. Computer vision comes into play here. We’ll have cameras on board. From the cameras, we need to analyze the 6D pose automatically, so the rotation and translation of the debris with respect to the chaser. How many are you? For the computer vision part, we’re five. Can you tell us more about the research side of your work? As I said, there’s a computer vision part at ClearSpace, but what we’re doing at ClearSpace is quite applied. We need things to work three years from now, and even that’s late. A whole world of research must be done to go beyond what we’re focusing on now at ClearSpace, which is one specific debris. We know the shape of the debris, so we have everything at hand to capture it, but we need to generalize to completely arbitrary debris that can result from a collision and have any shape. 13 DAILY CVPR Thursday Mathieu Salzmann