Surrey Engineers Employ Kinect To Develop Modular Space Structures
The Surrey Space Centre (SSC) intends to dock two cubesats in orbit, hoping to enable the mission upgrades and construction of modular devices in time. #-Link-Snipped-#, an alliance between Surrey University and Surrey Satellite Technology, shall employ spatial recognition technology from Microsoftâs Kinect console for docking. SSTL project lead Shaun Kenyon believes that the 2 or 3 small-sized Cubesats could be easily docked to build an efficient system in space.
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The project will be developed based on the experience acquired by STRaND-1, a cubesat powered by an Android Google Nexus 1 smartphone. Kenyon used Kinect because of its application programming interface, which even does the low-level computation enabling a live stream video of the depth field, so that more focus could be laid on higher level analysis. Docking systems have never been tried out on such small and low-budget operations and are generally arranged for big-budget space missions to the International Space Station (ISS) or the Mir space station and the Apollo program.