Development of air-bearing microgravity testbed for autonomous spacecraft rendezvous and robotic capture control of a free-floating target.

Robotic on-orbit servicing presents the opportunity for repairing and refueling satellites and deorbiting space objects. Performing such tasks is challenging because they must be done autonomously and accurately with high robustness. Ground testing, such as air-bearing-based spacecraft simulators, is widely used to develop and validate the design and control techniques of space robotics required by modern spacecraft applications. This paper presents the development of planar air-bearing microgravity simulators with a 3-DOF robotic manipulator for autonomous spacecraft tracking, rendezvous, and capture control of a free-floating target. The system includes a pseudo-galactic star tracking system for pose determination and navigation of spacecraft simulators. A second optical tracking module was also developed to determine the pose of a target spacecraft relative to the chaser spacecraft. Path planning and PD trajectory tracking algorithms were developed for spacecraft tracking and rendezvous. The experiments successfully demonstrated that the testbed could be used to study autonomous spacecraft rendezvous and capture a tumbling spacecraft by a robotic manipulator in a space-like testing environment. • Developed air-bearing spacecraft simulators for spacecraft rendezvous control. • Developed air-bearing lifted robotic manipulator for capturing a spinning target. • Tested autonomous path planning and autonomous robotic capture by the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]