Autonomous Perception and Manipulation of Cables and Fluid Lines for Remote Infrastructure Maintenance for Orbital and Lunar Missions

NASA's Moon-to-Mars roadmap calls for robotic systems which can complement and eventually replace humans for both routine and unplanned assembly, maintenance and inspection tasks for orbital and lunar surface infrastructure. The proposed innovation is an integrated perception and planning system to enable safe and productive interaction with cables and fluid lines, a ubiquitous element in any spacecraft or ground habitat, without human oversight. Handling cables and fluid lines involves a wide array of motion primitives and configurations. For example, they may need to be pulled aside to allow others to be installed, for panels to be inspected, or to unblock a passageway. Perhaps a gentle tug is necessary to confirm the connector it is linked to or to validate its stiffness before moving it more forcefully. As flexible materials, they settle in unpredictable configurations, and robots need to be able to adapt to what they see in the moment, rather than memorizing precomputed response patterns. Funding will be put towards developing software for four key capabilities required to safely interact with cables and fluid lines: view planning, detection, mapping and manipulation planning. Development will occur mainly in simulation and then a representative end-to-end scenario will be demonstrated in a lab environment. This technology’s space customers are NASA and other space agencies, as well as commercial space operators. It is intended to be deployed as a tech demo on Astrobee onboard the International Space Station. L5 would offer “Maintenance as a Service” at a rate which would drastically undercut the equivalent human labor rate. For Earth applications, it would support L5’s ongoing strawberry harvesting activity, specifically for the perception and manipulation of tangled strawberry stems, whose occlusion can prevent ripe specimens from being picked.