Multi-Agent Planning and Control for Autonomous On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing

To date, on-orbit satellite servicing and manufacturing (OSAM) tasks have leveraged a single servicing bus; however, NASA envisions OSAM solutions that involve heterogeneous teams of coordinated service robots. nbsp;It will be infeasible to effectively control such teams using existing teleoperation techniques. nbsp;To address this issue, TRACLabs is proposing to significantly improve OSAM capabilities with a multi-agent control framework that builds upon concepts from sliding autonomynbsp;and task-level commanding. nbsp;This work is based on TRACLabs#39; experience with the DARPA Robotics Challenge, various NASA humanoid platforms, and production manufacturing deployments. nbsp;We call this system CARTEL (Coordinated Autonomy to Replace TELeoperation). CARTELnbsp;will improve OSAM capabilities by facilitating faster, safer, and less complicated robot motions to achieve NASA#39;s mission goals.