Deformable Cargo Transport in Microgravity with Astrobee

TL;DR

This paper introduces pyastrobee, a Python-based simulation and control environment for Astrobee, focusing on cargo manipulation in microgravity, and demonstrates initial success with a sampling-based MPC controller on deformable models.

Contribution

The paper presents an open-source simulation environment and control stack for Astrobee, emphasizing deformable cargo transfer in microgravity, with novel control strategies using reduced-order models.

Findings

Preliminary success with sampling-based MPC controller

Effective control of deformable cargo models

Open-source, well-documented simulation environment

Abstract

We present pyastrobee: a simulation environment and control stack for Astrobee in Python, with an emphasis on cargo manipulation and transport tasks. We also demonstrate preliminary success from a sampling-based MPC controller, using reduced-order models of NASA's cargo transfer bag (CTB) to control a high-order deformable finite element model. Our code is open-source, fully documented, and available at https://danielpmorton.github.io/pyastrobee