Design and Demonstration for an Air-bearing-based Space Robot Testbed

Abstract

Multi-arm space robots will play the important role in the future space activities, such as on-orbit servicing, manufacturing and active debris removal, requiring more advanced techniques for the complicated planning and control problem. In order to verify the algorithms developed for them on the earth, this paper describes the design and demon-stration procedure for an air-bearing-based simulator. Firstly, the detailed design process is presented to overview both the hardware and software systems. Then the planar mathematical model of the simulator along with actuators configuration is proposed, following by the switch strategy for hybrid actuator and command transformation method. Finally, the experiment is executed to show the effectiveness and performance.