Sensor architecture for the robotic control of large flexible space structures

The future construction and maintenance of very large space structures (LSS) such as orbital solar power stations and telescopes will require teams of free-flying space robots. For robots to effectively perform these tasks, they will require knowledge of the structure’s vibrations. Here, a robotic based sensor architecture for the vibration estimation of very large structures is presented. It is shown that this information can be effectively estimated by combining data provided by free-flying remote robot “observers” with range sensors with structure-mounted acceleration sensors. A modified Kalman filter fuses low-bandwidth vision data from the remote sensing robots with the high-bandwidth, but spatially sparse structure-mounted acceleration sensors. Results from experimental studies are presented that confirm the effectiveness of this approach. Index Terms – space structures, cooperative sensing, shape estimation, space robotics, Kalman filter