Microgravity experiments for a visual feedback control of a space robot capturing a target

Abstract

We propose an experimental system of a space robot in the microgravity environment at the Japan Microgravity Center where microgravity (less than 10/sup -5/ g for 10 sec) is generated by a free-fall of 490 m. In the environment, we performed experiments for a visual feedback control of a space robot capturing a target. To measure the position of the target and the motion of the robot, two CCD cameras are used and their images are processed by the tracking vision. After the introduction of the experimental system, we establish two computational methods to identify the 3D position and orientation of the robot base, and show the experiments and their results to evaluate the proposed methods.