• Laboratory set-up
• Robotic
• Space environment simulation
• Visual-based navigation

This thesis has been done for ESA(European Space Agency) during an internship of 6 months in ESTEC, Noordwijk (Nl). It faces the challenges to reproduce Guidance, Navigation and Control's space conditions in a laboratory, passing trough all the phases of a laboratory's equipment design,testing and scenario-scaling.
The author wants to underline the importance of the testing phase, especially in space mission design procedure: everything in space has to be reliable and robust. But not only, the testing phase is fundamental to design innovative algorithms and solutions.
So the script is articulated in the phases described below.
First of all the reader is introduced to the terminology of visual cameras and laboratories.
After a general set-up's description, the third chapter explains in details all the requirements and constraints that had to be satisfied during the selection and design process.\\
Then the hardware and the software solutions are presented: everything has been done to be as much space-representative as possible without losing the ease in the use, the reliability and the versatility. During the design process was maximising the use of commercial and open-source components.
Moreover, a lot of attention was given to the distortions' correction, the noise lowering and the error reduction. In fact they influence negatively the experiments' success.\\
In Chapter \ref{Scale_traj} is described the selected test-mission: Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM). In the same chapter is enunciate the procedure to scale space representative trajectories in a robot's work-space.
Then all the implemented parts were tested and the results are reported in Chapter 7. For what that has not been possible to implement (e.g.vignetting correction and refocusing algorithm), some solutions were given.
To conclude,it is possible to say that the set-up satisfy the most of the ESA's requirements with good and innovative solutions. Moreover the design's process has opened theoretical questions that it is interesting to deepen in the future: the dynamic camera calibration and correction, the dynamic vignetting correction, the refocusing problem etc.