A System Design Concept of Autonomous Satellite Capturing by a Space Robot

Abstract

Satellite capturing is one of the most important and the most difficult task to provide on-orbit services. An appropriate role assignment of an on-board system and a ground station is important to design a system under the constraints of on-board computing power and communication time delay. This paper presents a design concept of autonomous satellite capturing system using a manipulator mounted satellite, together with the results of an space experiments using Engineering Test Satellite #7 (ETS-VII); a space robot designed by the concept.