Use of industrial robots for hardware-in-the-loop simulation of satellite rendezvous and docking

One of the most challenging and risky operations for spacecraft is to perform rendezvous and docking autonomously in space. To ensure a safe and reliable operation, such a mission must be carefully designed and thoroughly verified before a real space mission can be launched. This paper describes the control strategy for achieving high fidelity contact dynamics simulation of a new, robotics-based, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) rendezvous and docking simulation facility that uses two industrial robots to physically simulate the 6-DOF dynamic maneuvering of two docking satellites. The facility is capable of physically simulating the final approaching within a 25-meter range and the entire docking/capturing process for a satellite on-orbit servicing mission. The key difficulties of using industrial robots for high-fidelity HIL contact dynamics simulation were found and different solution techniques were investigated in the presented project. An admittance control method was proposed to achieve the goal of making the robots in the HIL simulation process match the impedance of the two docking satellites. Simulation study showed the effectiveness and performance of the proposed solution method.

► This work is to develop a hardware-in-the-loop simulator for verifying satellite docking.
► We revealed a major problem in using industrial robots for HIL docking simulation.
► We developed a control strategy to make the robots match the impedance of docking satellites.
► A simulation study verifies that the proposed control method achieves its goal.