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Dynamics and control of surface exploration robots on asteroids. (English) Zbl 1195.93088

Hirsch, Michael J. (ed.) et al., Optimization and cooperative control strategies. Proceedings of the 8th international conference on cooperative control and optimization, Gainesville, FL, USA, January 30–February 1, 2008. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-540-88062-2/pbk; 978-3-540-88063-9/ebook). Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences 381, 135-150 (2009).
Summary: Over the past decade, a few solo-robotic landing missions have been sent to asteroids at modest cost, providing a basic understanding of their environment. These missions can diversify and be improved upon by having multiple landers which also contribute to increasing the overall mission reliability. Since the gravity on an asteroid is low, a wheeled vehicle would likely bounce back from hitting the surface, and be difficult to control. Instead we consider hopping robots. We develop a first order model of the dynamics of hoppers to estimate the total time and distance covered from an initial bounce to a stop due to friction and restitution coefficients. From this dynamical model, hoppers could easily investigate the surface by controlling their initial velocity; one would just need to estimate to desired distance to be covered. To extend the single hopper control law to collaborative landers, we apply sliding-mode control to discrete formation control.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1157.49002].

MSC:

93C85 Automated systems (robots, etc.) in control theory
93A14 Decentralized systems
93B12 Variable structure systems
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