Maneuvering And Manipulation Of Flying Space Telerobotics System

A free flying telerobotics system has great potential for servicing future large unmanned space facilities because of its flexible maneuver- ability in space. We have been developing a ground model of the Astronaut Reference Flying Robot performing in-orbit servicing in the manner of an a stronaut with This paper deals with tonomous flying robot control structure of a duced for autonomous for a dynamic flying a manned maneuvering unit. control problems of the au- in a no-gravity field. The multilayered system is intro- operation. A control method maneuver in the proximity of the space facility using non-linear compensation is proposed. Moreover, simplified manipulation methods using inertial sensor compensation and ac- tive limp control are proposed for capturing a pay- load, and the effectiveness is shown through numer- ical simulation and experiments on an air bearing testbed. The demonstration experiment for the au- tonomous satellite retrieval mission was success- fully implemented on the testbed. arm using the inverse dynamics method (l, 21. Several studies on arm slew control under attitude disturbance due to arm motion were carried out using the kinematics of a base free robot (3,4). These methods require accurate knowledge of the mass/inertia property of a robot, and complex computation. Furthermore, the torque control of the actuator and thrust force of gas jet thrusters are necessary in the case of inverse dynamics control. These are not realistic for practical applications in space. Moreover, there are few papers discussing other important maneuvers before and after arm slew control required for in-orbit servicing. It is important to study control problems for overall task achievement including the flying maneuver and manipulation with momentum exchange according to practical space missions. In this paper, we deal with a series of control problems in a satellite retrieval mission which requires flying approach, capturing, docking and berthing. We propose new simplified algorithms for the maneuvers which accommodate space applications. We have been developing an experiment model of a free flying telerobotics system with a triple arm and propulsion system, working on a two-dimensional air bearing testbed. This paper presents the high-level control architecture of the robot, and presents the flying maneuver and manipulation methods under a no-gravity field. Robust coordinate control between the