Autonomous Satellite Capture by a Space Robot.

Abstract

appropriate instruction from the ground system as well as the algorism of an on-board software should be well considered to guarantee a sure execution of On-orbit service such as refueling, repairing and re- an on-board vision feed-back under rapidly orbiting is highly required for space activities. For changing on-orbit lighting condition, since the on-orbit service, it is one of the most important and computing power of a space qualified is most difficult technique to capture a “customer limited. satellite” by a robot arm which can move dynamically in a wide range of space. An on-board autonomy “machine vision” is highly required to perform this dynamic task, because a control loop including the ground station tends to be unstable because of the communication time delay between a ground station and a space robot. An experiment was conducted using Japanese Engineering Test Satellite VI1 (ETS-VII) [ 13 to capture a free floating satellite on orbit first time in the world. Successful results of the experiment are presented in this paper.