A visual servoing control system for lightweight robotic manipulator

Traditional spacecraft structures were rigid, but there is now an increasing trend towards lighter spacecraft whose structures and appendages are flexible. It is thus more and more important to consider the interaction between the structural elements of the spacecraft and its attitude and position control systems. The field of aerospace engineering is also very interested in the study of the robotics that has shown in the last decades a fast development due to remote control robots, that are able to operate in hostile environments and often unreachable by astronauts. The aim of this research program is to realize a visual-servoing control system for a couple of two aluminum and composite material arm manipulators, innovative because of the very high flexibility, stringent pointing requirements and a very low first vibration frequency. Visual-servoing is a rapidly maturing approach to the control of robot manipulators that is based on visual perception of robot and workspace location. More concretely, visual-servoing involves the use of one or more cameras and a computer vision system to control the position of the robot's end-effector relative to the workspace as required by the task. It is a multi-disciplinary research area spanning computer vision, robotics, kinematics, dynamics, control and real-time systems. Some experimental tests of tracking, to validate the system, are presented on a micro-gravity simulation set-up realized for this project