Inproceedings,
Finding and Following Optimal Trajectories for an Overactuated Floating Robotic Platform
16th Symposium on Advanced Space Technologies in Robotics and Automation (ASTRA '22), Noordwijk, Netherlands, ESA, (June 2022)
DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.2206.03993
Abstract
The recent increase in yearly spacecraft launches
and the high number of planned launches have raised
questions about maintaining accessibility to space
for all interested parties. A key to sustaining the
future of space-flight is the ability to service
malfunctioning - and actively remove dysfunctional
spacecraft from orbit. Robotic platforms that
autonomously perform these tasks are a topic of
ongoing research and thus must undergo thorough
testing before launch. For representative
system-level testing, the European Space Agency
(ESA) uses, among other things, the Orbital Robotics
and GNC Lab (ORGL), a flat-floor facility where
air-bearing based platforms exhibit free-floating
behavior in three Degrees of Freedom (DoF). This
work introduces a representative simulation of a
free-floating platform in the testing environment
and a software framework for controller
development. Finally, this work proposes a
controller within that framework for finding and
following optimal trajectories between arbitrary
states, which is evaluated in simulation and
reality.
