Validation and Demonstration of EROSS project: the European Robotic Orbital Support Services
Corresponding Authors: Sabrina Andiappanea, Gautier Duranda, Vincent Dubanchet, Pablo Lopez Negroa, Davide Casua, Anne Giovanninia, Jurij D’Amicoa
Abstract
The European Robotic Orbital Support Services (EROSS) project aims at developing, integrating and demonstrating the key European robotic building blocks within an autonomous solution for performing servicing tasks in orbit, and prepare for the future rendezvous missions on a longer term.EROSS assesses and demonstrates the capability of an on-orbit servicing spacecraft to perform medium and close-range rendezvous, and then to capture and manipulate a Client satellite. The Client satellite is considered collaborative and prepared as it is designed with specific features to ease the rendezvous and capture, but more importantly, to enable servicing operations such as refuelling and payload replacement by the robotic Servicer vehicle.The project embeds key European Technologies by leveraging on actuators, sensors, software frameworks and algorithms developed in previous European Projects and focuses on boosting their maturity. Firstly, it focuses on increasing their functionalities in a synergetic way, in order to enable their fast implementation and integration for a space mission in the near future. Secondly, it aims at validating their performances in representative environments for a defined mission scenario in order to increase their Technology Readiness Level (TRL).The current paper aims at presenting the mission demonstration scenario and the numerical validation of the key building blocks for the rendezvous mission, including visual sensors and capture actuators. Due to the impact of the covid19 crisis, the results presented in this paper focus on the numerical implementation of the GNC loop only, while experimental tests are delayed to 2021 and will be introduced in a future publication.The overall Guidance Navigation & Control (GNC) architecture is presented in the scope of the collaborative rendezvous considered in EROSS project. The compliance of the GNC architecture is assessed based on the resulting closed-loop performances derived from numerical simulations. These latter cover both the unitary testing of the Guidance, Navigation and Control functions in open loop, and then their integration in the closed-loop scheme to validate the overall solution performance.This project is led by Thales Alenia Space with support from GMV, National Technical University of Athens, PIAP Space, SENER, SINTEF AS, SODERN, Space Application Services, MDA and QinetiQ.
more: https://cloud.piap-space.com/index.php/s/q8NOj9ZugbAKz7i
