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Flattening the Curve of Flexible Space Robotics

This version is not peer-reviewed.

Submitted:

25 January 2022

Posted:

28 January 2022

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Abstract
Infrastructure monitoring, inspection, repair, and replacement in space is crucial for continued usage and safety, yet it is expensive, time-consuming, and technical very challenging. New robotics technologies and artificial intelligence algorithms are potentially novel approaches that may alleviate such demanding operations using existing or novel sensing technologies. Space structures must necessarily be very light weight due to high costs of placing robots in space. Several methods are proposed and compared to control highly flexible space robotics, where a key challenge is the presence of flexible resonant modes at frequencies so low as to reside inside typical feedback controller bandwidths. Such conditions imply the very action of sending control signals to the ultra-light weight robotics will cause structural resonance. Implementations of incrementally increasing order are offered, achieving over ninety percent performance improvement in trajectory tracking errors, while improvement using unshaped methods merely achieve twenty-four percent improvement in direct comparison (where the only modification is the proposed control methodology). Based on superior performance, single-sinusoidal trajectory shaping is recommended with a corollary benefit of preparing future research into applying deterministic artificial intelligence whose current instantiation relies on single-sinusoidal, autonomous trajectory generation.
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Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.

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