Task planning for robotic manipulation in space applications

Space-based robotic systems will require novel technologies of planning and manipulation to accomplish complex tasks such as diagnosis, repair, and assembly task representation, discrete task planning, and control synthesis which provide a design environment for assembly systems, and which extend to planning of manipulation operations in unstructured environments. In this approach, assembly planning is carried out using the AND/OR graph representation which encompasses all possible partial orders of operations and may be used to plan assembly sequences. A novel algorithm for planning disassembly and repair using the AND/OR graph is introduced, and examples of repair sequences generated for a satellite electrical module are described. For discrete task planning, the configuration map facilitates search over discrete parameters in the space of bounded configuration sets. >