Project aims to dock cubesats for modular space structures

STRaND-2 — a collaboration between Surrey University and Surrey Satellite Technology — will use spatial awareness technology from Microsoft’s Kinect console peripheral for docking.

‘Cubesats are very handy and they have opened up the field of demonstrating technologies for a very low cost,’ SSTL project lead Shaun Kenyon told The Engineer. ‘But at the same time they are really, really small, so if we can dock two or three, or however many together then you can build a more capable system in space.’

The project will build on experience gained by STRaND-1, a cubesat that is powered by an Android Google Nexus 1 smartphone. Indeed, it continues a tradition at SSTL of using off-the shelf-components, where possible, and adapting them for a space environment.

‘The wonderful thing about the Kinect API [application programming interface] is that it looks after that very low-level calculation of distances for you, so you can get a live stream of the depth field as a video — a lot of the very complex processing has already taken place and you can concentrate on the higher-level analysis such as edge detection or object detection,’ Kenyon said.