AI to help world's first removal of space debris

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