Orbital Mechanic: CRAFTSMAN for On-orbit Satellite Servicing

On-orbit satellite servicing (OSS) has been receiving increasing interest from government entities. OSS increases the lifetime of satellites in orbit, but currently requires expensive and limited astronaut time. NASA and DARPA/NRL have both proposed upcoming missions to service satellites using re-usable service satellites -- in both low-Earth and geosynchronous orbits. These missions will rely on mixtures of human-in-the-loop and autonomous control to remotely command service satellites with manipulation capabilities. Through previous projects, TRACLabs has contacts at the Air Force Research Laboratory who have begun to investigate OSS tasks using robotic manipulators. Reliable teleoperation of remote robots in manipulation tasks is a challenging open area of robotics research. To address this challenge, TRACLabs has developed CRAFTSMAN, a toolkit for expert and non-expert users to reliably operate robots. CRAFTSMAN has been adopted in various projects by both NASA and private industry customers. In Phase I of this project, we will demonstrate the utility of CRAFTSMAN in a simulated Air Force OSS domain and will identify extensions to the CRAFTSMAN framework needed to address Air Force OSS needs.