AUTONOMOUS CAPTURE OF FREE-FLOATING OBJECTS USING PREDICTIVE APPROACH

摘要

This paper presents an online method for autonomous capture of a free-flying object using a robotic manipulator. The motion of the object is simplified to a pure-spin rotation about a principal axis. The predictions of the object's trajectory from a Kalman filter are combined with the times from the time-optimal trajectory generator to select the earliest interception location. The capture location is actively recomputed while the robot procedes to the rendez-vous point and new information about the target trajectory becomes available. The trajectory of the manipulator may be replanned if the predictions change. This method has been called active-prediction-planning-execution in the literature. In the paper, we will present results of a MATLAB/Simulink simulation of the new interception algorithm and the experimental results showing the performance of the method. The experiments have been conducted in a novel facility using an helium airship to emulate the behaviour of a satellite.