Visual Servoing and Impedance Control in Robotic Manipulators for On-Orbit Servicing

This paper presents a controller for a robotic manipulator for spacecraft docking operations oriented to on-orbit servicing. The proposed controller combines visual and force/torque feedback in order to complete the approach and contact phases of the docking. Visual servoing is used not only for gui...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2020 25th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA) Vol. 1; pp. 734 - 741
Main Authors Garcia, Javier, Rodriguez, Andres, Estremera, Joaquin, Santamaria, Bruno, Gonzalez, Diego, Armendia, Mikel
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.09.2020
Subjects
docking
End effectors
Fixtures
impedance control
on-orbit servicing
Orbits
robotic manipulator
Space vehicles
spacecraft
Stability analysis
Visual servoing
Visualization
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Summary:This paper presents a controller for a robotic manipulator for spacecraft docking operations oriented to on-orbit servicing. The proposed controller combines visual and force/torque feedback in order to complete the approach and contact phases of the docking. Visual servoing is used not only for guiding the end-effector during the approach phase, but also to maintain the end-effector probe correctly aligned during the contact phase. During the contact phase, an impedance controller generates the compliant behavior needed to minimize the peak forces that could result in a failed docking. The proposed controller has been tested experimentally in a hardware-in-the-loop robotic test-bench showing that in this ground-testing environment docking can be completed successfully for a set of initial conditions (relative speed of the spacecraft).
ISSN:1946-0759
DOI:10.1109/ETFA46521.2020.9211989