Recent Developments in Robust, Accurate Autonomous Assembly Methods for Surface and Orbital Structures

Abstract

To enable autonomous in-space assembly as a practical option for future space missions, numerous fields in robotics require significant advances including autonomous sequence planning, structural error detection and localization, and a comprehensive hardware prototype testbed on which these methods can be implemented and validated. This paper describes multiple efforts to improve the state of the art in each of these areas and discusses recent results in these efforts.