Microwave radiometers are widely used for remote sensing and radio astronomical observations. Their absolute accuracy depends on the performance of the blackbody targets which are used for the radiometric calibration. In this paper we summarize the performance aspects of such calibration targets and present different designs for upcoming ESA missions.

This paper presents the design of a Cartesian space LQR controller for full three dimensional position based visual servoing. It is shown that by designing the controller in Cartesian space, the design process can be greatly simplified if the LQR cost function is selected appropriately. Experimental results which demonstrate the significant improvements in system performance obtained with this design method are also presented.

This paper presents a complete design methodology for Cartesian position based visual servo control for robots with a single camera mounted at the end-effector. Position based visual servo control requires the explicit calculation of the relative position and orientation (POSE) of the workpiece object with respect to the camera. This is accomplished using image plane measurements of a number of known feature points on the object, and then applying an extended Kalman filter to obtain a recursive solution of the photogrammetric equations, and to properly combine redundant measurements. The control is then designed by specifying the desired trajectories with respect to the object and forming the control error in the end-effector frame. The implementation using a distributed computer architecture is described. An experimental system has been built and used to evaluate the performance of the POSE estimation and the position based visual servo control. Several results for relative trajectory control and target tracking are presented. Results of the experiments showing the effect of loss of some of the redundant features are also presented.