PLANNING AND CONTROL FOR NEXT GENERATION SPACE ROBOTS

In the first part of the talk, Dr. Marco Pavone will discuss the design of a hopping robot for the in-situ exploration of small Solar system bodies. The actuation of the robot relies on spinning three internal flywheels, which allows all subsystems to be packaged in one sealed enclosure and enables the platform to be minimalistic. Dr. Pavone will discuss planning and control challenges for such robots and progress made to-date.

In the second part of the talk, Dr. Pavone will present a novel approach to autonomous spacecraft maneuvering that leverages recent algorithmic advances in the field of robotic motion planning to spacecraft control. He will begin with an introduction of a novel sampling-based algorithm for motion planning, called the Fast Marching Tree algorithm (FMT*). The FMT* algorithm is asymptotically optimal and appears to converge to an optimal path faster (and sometimes significantly faster) than its state-of-the-art counterparts. Dr. Pavone will then discuss the application of FMT* to spacecraft control and present preliminary experimental results on Stanford's air-bearing spacecraft test bed. http://web.stanford.edu/~pavone/

Speaker: Dr. Marco Pavone, Stanford