System Design of Robots for Application to In-Space Assembly

This paper presents the design of an experimental system for assembly applications in space. The prototypical application is the assembly of mechanical trusses. The system used an air-hockey table to simulate a frictionless two-dimensional space. Assembly robots fly on the surface finding, gathering and assembling the relevant parts to perform the construction. The system design involved building the FIMER Robots, the test bed, the sensing system for position and velocity feedback and the control scheme. This paper describes the hardware and software used in the various sub-systems and includes calibrations and measurements and the results of experiments.