Towards vision assisted space robotics: some examples and experimental results

Automatic handling, maintenance and repair procedures in orbital space applications will gain importance in the future. Lightweight space robots could be used for many of these tasks, provided they would be dexterous enough and more flexible in their perception of the working environment than the present ones. The employment of vision enables a robot to grasp, and manipulate inspected objects autonomously. The paper describes the interaction between robot, camera and a multisensory gripper for performance of local repair tasks, e.g. opening the jammed solar panel of a satellite, by 3D active inspection. Central points of interest have been the composition of information acquired from image sequences as well as the object localization in the robot work space and the supervision of grasping procedures. Besides a description of the system structure and the underlying ideas, experiences and results from terrestrial lab experiments are presented in order to discuss the limits and possibilities of the use of vision for space robotic tasks.