Visual Monitoring and Servoing of a Cutting Blade during Telerobotic Satellite Servicing
Amama Mahmood, Balazs P. Vagvolgyi, Will Pryor, Louis L. Whitcomb, Peter Kazanzides, Simon Leonard
Abstract
We propose a system for visually monitoring and servoing the cutting of a multi-layer insulation (MLI) blanket that covers the envelope of satellites and spacecraft. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) to propose a model for relating visual features describing the engagement depth of the blade to the force exerted on the MLI blanket by the cutting tool, 2) a blade design and algorithm to reliably detect the engagement depth of the blade inside the MLI, and 3) a servoing mechanism to achieve the desired applied force by monitoring the engagement depth. We present results that validate these contributions by comparing forces estimated from visual feedback to measured forces at the blade. We also demonstrate the robustness of the blade design and vision processing under challenging conditions.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2020_visualmonitoring,
title = {Visual Monitoring and Servoing of a Cutting Blade during Telerobotic Satellite Servicing},
author = {Amama Mahmood and Balazs P. Vagvolgyi and Will Pryor and Louis L. Whitcomb and Peter Kazanzides and Simon Leonard},
booktitle = {IROS 2020},
year = {2020}
}