Quartaro Amy, Moser Joshua, Cooper John, Komendera Erik
FASER Lab, Virginia Tech, Mechanical Engineering Department, Blacksburg, VA, United States.
Autonomous Integrated Systems Research Branch, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, United States.
Front Robot AI. 2025 Jul 29;12:1565837. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2025.1565837. eCollection 2025.
Outfitting and maintenance are important to an in-space architecture consisting of long duration missions. During such missions, crew is not continuously present; robotic agents become essential to the construction, maintenance, and servicing of complicated space assets, requiring some degree of autonomy to plan and execute tasks. There has been significant research into manipulation planning for rigid elements for in-space assembly and servicing, but flexible electrical cables, which fall under the domain of Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs), have not received such attention despite being critical components of powered space systems. Cables often have a non-zero bend equilibrium configuration, which the majority of DLO research does not consider. This article implements a model-based optimization approach to estimate cable configuration, where a design parameter of the model's discretization level enables trading model accuracy vs computational complexity. Observed 2D cable configurations are used to improve the model via parameter estimation. The parameter estimation is validated through comparing predicted configurations based on estimated parameters to that of a real cable. The incorporation of parameter estimation to the cable model is shown to reduce prediction errors by an order of magnitude. The results of this work demonstrate some of the challenges present with robotic cable manipulation, exploring the complexities of outfitting and maintenance operations of in-space facilities, and puts forth a method for reducing the size of the state space of a cable payload while accounting for non-zero equilibrium configurations.
装备和维护对于由长期任务组成的太空架构至关重要。在这类任务期间，航天员并非持续在场；机器人对于复杂太空资产的建造、维护和维修变得至关重要，这需要一定程度的自主性来规划和执行任务。对于太空装配和维修中刚性元件的操作规划已有大量研究，但作为可变形线性物体（DLO）范畴的柔性电缆，尽管是动力太空系统的关键部件，却未受到如此关注。电缆通常具有非零弯曲平衡构型，而大多数DLO研究并未考虑这一点。本文实施了一种基于模型的优化方法来估计电缆构型，其中模型离散化水平的设计参数能够在模型精度与计算复杂度之间进行权衡。通过观测到的二维电缆构型，利用参数估计来改进模型。通过将基于估计参数预测的构型与真实电缆的构型进行比较，对参数估计进行验证。结果表明，将参数估计纳入电缆模型可将预测误差降低一个数量级。这项工作的结果展示了机器人电缆操作存在的一些挑战，探索了太空设施装备和维护操作的复杂性，并提出了一种在考虑非零平衡构型的同时减小电缆有效载荷状态空间大小的方法。
