Agent-based design of fault tolerant manipulators for satellite docking

A rapidly deployable fault tolerant manipulator system consists of modular hardware and support software that allow the user to quickly configure and deploy a fault tolerant manipulator that is custom-tailored for a given task. The main focus of this paper is on the task based design component of such a system, that is, the determination of the optimal manipulator configuration, its base position and the corresponding joint space trajectory for a given task. We introduce a novel agent-based solution approach to task based design and illustrate it with a fault tolerant manipulator design for a satellite docking operation aboard the space shuttle.