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.