Study on intelligent visual servoing of space robot for cooperative target capturing

One important area for the application of space robotics is autonomous On-Orbit Servicing (OOS) of failed spacecrafts. Visual servo of eye-in-hand type system is one of the most promising approaches to perform this task. This paper describes research and development of a visual servoing system for autonomous satellite capture using an on-board manipulator with binocular hand-eye cameras. Taking account of the special aspects of space environment such as lighting and available computing power, to realize a safe and reliable real-time visual servoing operation, cooperative visual marker search processing, time delay processing, and capture strategy have been carefully designed. Some critical constraints such as FOV limit, joint range limits, kinematic singularities, and joint velocity limits are concerned during visual servoing. A ground experiment system based on air-bearing table is set up. With the system, experiments of autonomous capturing target are conducted. The results validate the effectiveness of our research.