<title>Performance measurement of autonomous grasping software in a simulated orbital environment</title>

Abstract

The EVAHR (extravehicular activity helper/retriever) robot is being developed to perform a variety of navigation and manipulation tasks under astronaut supervision. The EVAHR is equipped with a manipulator and dexterous end-effector for capture and a laser range imager with pan/tilt for target perception. Perception software has been developed to perform target pose estimation, tracking, and motion estimation for rigid, freely rotating, polyhedral objects. Manipulator grasp planning and trajectory control software has also been developed to grasp targets while avoiding collisions. A software simulation of the EVAHR hardware, orbital dynamics, collision detection, and grasp impact dynamics has been developed to test and measure the performance of the integrated software. Performance measurements include grasp success/failure % and time-to-grasp for a variety of targets, initial target states, and simulated pose estimation computing resources.