Spacecraft formation flying control around L2 sun-earth libration point using on–off SDRE approach

In this paper, on–off SDRE control approach is presented for spacecraft formation flying control around sun-earth L2 libration point. Orbits around libration points are significant targets for many space missions mainly because of efficient fuel consumption. Furthermore, less propellant usage can be achieved by considering optimal control approaches in spacecraft formation flying control design. Among various nonlinear and optimal control methods, SDRE has shown to be a popular controller in various missions due to the privileges including efficiency, accuracy and robustness. The spacecraft are assumed to have on–off thrusters as actuators. It requires them to be fed with a sequence of on–off pulses which is regarded as a challenge for spacecraft designers. Hence, the main contribution of this paper is designing an on–off SDRE approach for the formation flight around sun-earth L2 point with uncertainty with energy and accuracy considerations. Including on–off input as a constraint is not feasible for SDRE implementation because it makes the system non-affine. An alternative is utilizing an integral action technique and an auxiliary control to make the system affine which leads to on–off SDRE approach. It has also been shown that the proposed method is robust against parametric uncertainties of the states. Present study aims to design an energy-beneficial, simple and attractive controller for a complex nonlinear system with on–off inputs and uncertainty in CRTBP. Simulation results show that the on–off SDRE control could provide the formation flight around L2 point with high accuracy using less energy consumption.     

Design and fabrication of robotic gripper for grasping in minimizing contact force

This paper presents a new method to improve the kinematics of robot gripper for grasping in unstructured environments, such as space operations. The robot gripper is inspired from the human hand and kept the hand design close to the structure of human fingers to provide successful grasping capabilities. The main goal is to improve kinematic structure of gripper to increase the grasping capability of large objects, decrease the contact forces and makes a successful grasp of various objects in unstructured environments. This research will describe the development of a self-adaptive and reconfigurable robotic hand for space operations through mechanical compliance which is versatile, robust and easy to control. Our model contains two fingers, two-link and three-link, with combining a kinematic model of thumb index. Moreover, some experimental tests are performed to examine the effectiveness of the hand-made in real, unstructured tasks. The results represent that the successful grasp range is improved about 30% and the contact forces is reduced approximately 10% for a wide range of target object size. According to the obtained results, the proposed approach provides an accommodative kinematic model which makes the better grasping capability by fingers geometries for a robot gripper.