Artificial Intelligence #vision-language models#spacecraft inspection
Prompt-Driven AI Models Enable On-Orbit Spacecraft Inspection Without Retraining
Researchers demonstrate that prompt-driven vision-language models can perform zero-shot instance segmentation of spacecraft components on orbit without modifying onboard weights, enabling post-launch semantic expansion. The approach achieves 0.385 mAP@0.5 on a test set of 129 images of unseen satellites, with strong performance on large structures but challenges on fine-scale appendages. Structured prompts improve accuracy by up to 82% over simple category names.
Jun 16, 2026 1 source