Predictive Controllers for Load Transportation in Microgravity Environments

Sammanfattning: Space activities have been increasing dramatically in the past decades. As a result, the number of space debris has also increased significantly. Therefore, it is necessary to clean up and remove them to prevent a collision between space debris and spacecraft. In this thesis, we focus on load transportation using tethers, which connect multiple robots and loads together with lightweight cables. We propose a generalized framework to model and calculate the interaction force for the tethered multi-robot system. Then, we develop centralized and decentralized non-linear Model Predictive Control (MPC) controllers to complete a transportation task. Two simulators, a numerical and physical simulator, are presented and used to evaluate the performance of the controllers. The numerical simulator is used to verify the proposed model and evaluate the controllers for the ideal case. The physical simulator is then used to validate the performance of both centralized and decentralized controllers in real-time settings. Finally, we demonstrate how the proposed controllers perform in two and three-dimensional experiments.