Autonomous satellite capture by a space robot: world first on-orbit experiment on a Japanese robot satellite ETS-VII

On-orbit service such as refuelling, repairing and re-orbiting is highly required for space activities. For on-orbit service, it is one of the most important and most difficult technique to capture a "customer satellite" by a robot arm which can move dynamically in a wide range of space. An on-board autonomy "machine vision" is highly required to perform this dynamic task, since a control loop including the ground station tends to be unstable due to the communication time delay between a ground station and a space robot. An experiment was conducted using the Japanese Engineering Test Satellite VII (ETS-VII) to capture a free floating satellite on orbit first time in the world. Successful results of the experiment are presented.