Autonomous Capture of a Resident Space Object by a Spacecraft with a Robotic Manipulator: Analysis, Simulation and Experiments

Abstract

This paper describes a set of laboratory-based experiments, which demonstrate the autonomous capture of a non-moving resident space object by a spacecraft equipped with a single robotic manipulator. An air bearing test bed is used to simulate weightlessness and frictionless maneuvering on a plane. The chaser is composed by a floating spacecraft simulator carrying a kinematically redundant four-link serial manipulator. The manipulator mass is similar to the mass of its base-spacecraft, resulting in an unusually large dynamic coupling. Emphasis is given to the guidance and control, demonstrating floating, flying and rotation-flying coordinated control strategies. A resolved-motion-rate controller regulates the manipulator joint velocities. The relative navigation problem, solved by the test bed metrology system, has been left outside the scope of this effort. The presented experiments increase the number of space robotics experimental evaluations conducted in dynamically representative environments. Nomenclature

Laboratory experiments of resident space object capture by a spacecraft–manipulator system

“…1 for an overview of the experimental setup. The experiments presented here are a continuation of an earlier set of experiments conducted by the authors in the POSEIDYN test bed [22]. Previously flown and experimentally tested spacecraft-manipulator systems have exhibited substantially more benign mass and inertia ratios than the ones found in the spacecraft-manipulator system used for this set of experiments.…”

“…Another option to simplify the system is to formulate the equations of motion from the system's center-of-mass [22], directly obtaining a linear system. The performance measure of an infinite-horizon LQR can be written as in Eq.…”

Experimental Validation of Pseudospectral-Based Optimal Trajectory Planning for Free-Floating Robots

“…This differs from existing techniques due to the fact that it includes the possibility to constrain the final velocity of the EE by making the period of the capture maneuver an optimization variable. Virgili-Llop et al [19,20] described a set of laboratory-based experiments using a free-floating robot in which they demonstrated the autonomous capture of a nonmoving space object using a robotic manipulator. The authors made use of the Proximity Operation of Spacecraft: Experimental hardware-In-the-loop DYNamic Simulator testing platform [21], which can create a quasi-frictionless planar environment.…”

A convex-programming-based guidance algorithm to capture a tumbling object on orbit using a spacecraft equipped with a robotic manipulator

“…The complexity of the presented experimental demonstration surpasses previous experimental work known to the authors, significantly advancing the demonstrated state-of-the-art related to the capture of tumbling RSOs by spacecraft equipped with robotic manipulators. Previous work using planar air bearing test beds (Schwartz et al, 2003) includes Alexander and Cannon (1989), Umetani and Yoshida (1989), Ullman and Cannon (1993), Chen and Cannon (1994), Russakow et al (1995), Yoshida (1994), Nahon et al (1995), Menon et al (2007), Toglia et al (2011), Wilde et al (2016), Virgili-Llop et al (2016b), and Sabatini et al (2017). Other relevant experimental work on orbit or on other types of experimental facilities (Xu et al, 2011) includes Oda et al (1996), Ogilvie et al (2008), Aghili (2008), Xu et al (2009), and Persson and Sharf (2015) among others.…”