Design and Experimental Study of Automatic Docking and Undocking Robot System for Launch Vehicle Propellant Filling

An automatic docking and undocking robot system was designed for the propellant filling process before the launch of the launch vehicle, instead of manually completing the filling operation. This filling robot system consists of a robot body, a control system and a positioning system. The robot body includes a base, a SCARA manipulator and a gentle docking and withdrawal system. The SCARA manipulator is coordinated to achieve the positioning and tracking of the rocket filling port through the control system and the positioning system, and then the gentle docking and withdrawal system completes the docking of the fill-drain connector and the rocket filling port as the robot’s execution end. The positioning system mainly uses a lidar system, which detects the target board to achieve positioning and tracking based on artificial beacons, and uses the arithmetic mean method to perform error compensation. Finally, a large number of experimental studies verify the reliability and stability of the robot system.