New Testing Facility for Proximity Operations in Space

On-Earth testing of space scenarios is one of the key steps during the development of new technologies, being the reproduction of space-like conditions one of the main challenges. In this paper, a testbed designed and developed for testing of proximity operations scenarios such as rendezvous and docking (RvD) or formation flying is presented. The testbed is based on two industrial manipulators and has been developed and used for the validation of pose estimation algorithms for RvD with non-cooperative targets at the University of Würzburg.