# Illumination-aware active perception for spacecraft inspection

- Source: arXiv cs.RO
- Published: 2026-10-27T04:00:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/p2mantzvq6dbbqjn4g5s8hszq
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22335

## Summary

The authors propose an inspection planning framework that replaces geometric visibility checks with a learned camera information metric based on a classifier variational autoencoder (VAE), to address inspection failures caused by drastic orbital illumination changes. The method implements a guidance, navigation, and control architecture in a photorealistic physics simulator and tests multiple orbital illumination conditions and viewpoints: average brightness reaches 0.57, with 81.6% of observations above 0.25, compared with 0.02 (3.0%) for geometric planning with illumination bands and 0.04 (6.0%) for pure geometric planning.