LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS FOR ORBITAL DEBRIS REMOVAL
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The orbital debris removal problem poses distinct technological challenges in sensing and autonomous control. Thorough testing of autonomous space systems is required before flight, but many ground-based facilities inadequately approximate the on-orbit environment. In this paper we describe a ground-based robotic emulation system for testing autonomous orbit debris missions and present recent experimental results. We have developed a novel active pendulum that suspends the debris target and approximates resultant contact motion. The target debris object is a reduced-scale upper-stage booster. A wheeled motion emulation robot provides six degrees of freedom for the pursuing capture vehicle and is equipped with a grappling mechanism, an inertial measurement unit, and a load cell. An autonomous guidance, navigation, and control package produces force and torque inputs into a dynamic simulation of the chaser spacecraft. The motion emulation robot follows the resultant trajectory in the laboratory space using measurements from a motion capture system as ground truth. Inputs from the load cell also feed into the chaser vehicle simulation in an effort to predict post-collision motion. Experimental data is fed real-time into a custom user interface that runs in a Web browser. Our results show the successful capture of static and spinning targets.
