LCSR Seminar

Description

Abstract

There are currently more than two thousand satellites catalogued on-orbit. Most of them were designed with a finite service life limited by fuel for altitude control and altitude boost. When the fuel is consumed, or a fault occurs in a satellite, scientists presently lack the ability to conduct on-orbit refueling and repairs. NASA's Space Shuttle Program enabled a variety of satellite service missions, but all were performed by human spacewalks or robots controlled by crew from within the spacecraft. The most well-known examples are the Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions. However, the risks and cost of using astronauts make satellite servicing by humans prohibitive in all but a very few cases. NASA is currently developing the capabilities necessary to perform satellite servicing tasks telerobotically, with ground-based robot operators. The planned unmanned servicing spacecraft will be equipped with an array of sensors, remotely operated robotic arms, and servicing tools.

In the talk, JHU's Balazs Vagvolgyi will give an overview of NASA's past and future servicing missions and discuss the partnership between JHU's Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics and NASA's Satellite Servicing Projects Division in developing novel robot control methods and robotic tools for upcoming missions. The research efforts at JHU-LCSR focus on facilitating the cutting of thermal insulation on satellites using force sensitive robotic tools and dynamical modeling of the cutting process, and improving the situational awareness of robot operators while performing complex manipulation tasks with limited visual feedback by employing mixed-reality visualization techniques.