Speaker
Mr
Juan Antonio Bejar-Romero
(GMV Aerospace and Defence S.A.U.)
Description
The set-up and use of ground validation testing facilities from the early phases of the missions can provide a very valuable feedback to the equipment and technologies being developed. The validation activities of the own ground testing facilities are key to the usability and confidence of the results obtained from them. GMV’s platform-art dynamic test bench has already been validated (for navigation purposes based on optical cameras) with flight data coming from PRISMA mission through the PRISMA-HARVD experiment. In addition, platform-art dynamic test bench is currently being extended thanks to ESA loan of several new devices, including a new high-span KUKA robotic arm, which will extend the functionality of the current test bench. On the other hand, ESA has established an air-bearing facility known as ORBIT (Orbit Robotics Bench for Integrated Technology). The facility located within ESTEC’s Automation and Robotic laboratories provides several air-bearing platforms which can move frictionless on a 45 m² flat floor.
The in-space Robotic Servicing Physical Assessment (ROSPA) is a study with the purpose of recreating and studying the dynamics during/after contact between target and chaser in a rendezvous and capture mission. The data of the experiments run in the platform-art (GMV) and in ORBIT (ESA) will be used for a cross-validation of the facilities.
Two different scenarios have been setup in both facilities: simple contact and gripping scenario. In the simple contact scenario the Mitsubishi PA10 robotic arm approaches the specifically designed mock-up mounted on the air-bearing (or on the KUKA robotic arm, in platform-art) and touches it through a compliance device and a load cell to measure the contact forces and torques. In the gripping scenario the compliance device is replaced by a gripping device, which after an open loop trajectory attempts the gripping of a Launch Adapter Ring (LAR) mock-up.
In the scope of the activity also another functionality of the platform-art facility is exploited: the space-like environment simulation. This functionality has been developed and demonstrated in the frames of previous collaborations between ESA and GMV, for projects such as NEOGNC (Interplanetary mission, MarcoPolo-R) and ANDROID (Active Debris removal mission). The output of this activity is a data base of representative images taken during an open loop sequence of the robotic arm approach and the gripping with the LAR of a mock-up of the TANGO spacecraft (the 2nd spacecraft of the Swedish PRISMA mission). The representativeness of the images in such a close range scenario is meant in terms of illumination conditions and disturbances recreated in laboratory like fuel on lens, micro pieces of MLI floating and thruster plume in the Camera FoV.
| Applicant type | First author |
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Primary authors
Mr
Andrea Pellacani
(GMV)
Mr
Hendrik Kolvenbach
(ESTEC)
