Inspection and control system for experiments in space robotics

Abstract

The communication subsystem is one among the various subsystems of a telerobotic space system. It is responsible for coordinating the commands received from the teleoperator control subsystem to the robotic arm, for reading signals from the sensors, and for stating the communication of the telerobot with the ground station. The telerobotic experiment under development by the ITA space robotics research group was developed with the purpose of investigating a robotic space system dynamics and control, including the study of the working and integration of all subsystems involved in the teleoperation control. The lab experiment consists of two identical units of robot manipulators, each of them mounted on its own floating air-supported platform. The objective is to simulate computationally the operations of rendezvous and capture in the microgravity' orbital environment, emulated by the floating manipulators' dynamics. The closed circuit for this system involves the in time position detection, transmission and data processing by using a position-tracking (X, Y, and Z) computer system combined with a Kinect sensor (RGB-D). The computer system comprises two computers capable of processing the positional images with greater accuracy. One of them receive and send the sensor data to a second computer which performs the data processing by proper algorithms in Matlab® and Simulink and sends commands to the robotic arm via WIFI (UDP protocol) network. The robot receives and executes the control signals moving the robotic arms whose position is again detected by the kinect sensor and informed back to the computer system, closing the control mesh and allowing the safe capture of the target. This work deals with the communication subsystem of the space robot experiment and its ability to set an integrated and efficient communication satisfying the telerobot control requirements