Air-bearing testbed of spacecraft tight formation: system description and experiments
Keywords:
air-bearing robots, spacecraft formations, on-ground micro-gravity facility, formation control, collision avoidanceAbstract
Via cooperation among multiple spacecraft, spacecraft formations can enable many near Earth and deep-space missions with low cost but high robustness. Controlling spacecraft formations is more complicated than that of traditional monolithic spacecraft. Control algorithms must be sufficiently tested and validated on ground. Hence onground facility that provides micro-gravity environment are indispensable. This work presents the on-ground formation flight testbed in Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The testbed is consisted of a highly-flat granite surface, four air-bearing robots, and a camera-based motion measurement subsystem. Each robot can move frictionlessly on the granite surface with three degree of freedoms, including two translational and one rotational degree of freedoms. Each robot is controlled by four carefully-calibrated fans. Several test experiments shows that centimeter-level position control accuracy and less-than-one-degree level attitude control accuracy can be achieved. A tight formation control experiment with sophisticated scenario demonstrates that the air-bearing testbed is scalable, and capable of testing multi-spacecraft control algorithms.
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