Design and Preliminary Ground Experiment for Robotic Assembly of a Modular Space Telescope

Large-aperture space telescope is the key equipment for studying the origin and evolution of the universe and various celestial bodies. Developing large-aperture space telescope is challenging and has become a priority in the field of optical engineering. Due to the mass and volume constraints of la...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zainan Jiang, Zhiqi Li, Chongyang Li, Dapeng Yang, Hong Liu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8888165/
Description
Summary:Large-aperture space telescope is the key equipment for studying the origin and evolution of the universe and various celestial bodies. Developing large-aperture space telescope is challenging and has become a priority in the field of optical engineering. Due to the mass and volume constraints of launch vehicles, it has to be designed and launched in modules and then assembled on-orbit by space robots. In this paper, we present a conceptual of 10-meter diameter modular space telescope together with robotic assembly strategy. To fulfill on-orbit assembly and maintenance of the space telescope, a novel assembly robot with a ring-shaped mobile base and a redundant stretchable manipulator is proposed. The time-optimal trajectory planning based on genetic algorithm is utilized to achieve efficient assembly. The preliminary ground experiment of assembling submirror modules of space telescope using the KUKA LWR iiwa-7 is carried to verify the feasibility of the proposed method, and the results show that the assembly task of telescope modules can be accomplished successfully with appropriate forces and torques.
ISSN:2169-3536