IDSR

The Institute for Dexterous Space Robotics is an initiative started by NASA in 2006.  This university consortium (University of Maryland, Carnegie-Mellon University, and Stanford University) is performing research to accommodate NASA's current and future needs in the field of space robotics.  Specifically, Stanford is working on the problem of docking with a tumbling spacecraft.

Photo courtesy SSL

During the first year, the major goal of the project was to verify Stanford's ability to interface with the hardware testbeds available at the University of Maryland.  Many of the demonstrations were planned for SCAMP, a small mobile platform equipped with a camera.  This robot is operated in the Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility (NBRF), which is part of the Space Systems Lab (SSL) at UMd.  Stanford was able to port existing algorithms written for relative pose estimation and closed-loop control to SCAMP.  This initial demonstration of viable communication between Stanford's in-house code and a foreign hardware platform was a big first step.

 
A demonstration is planned as a culmination of this first phase where SCAMP would track a planar target equipped with four fiducial markers.  Once the vision algorithms lock onto the markers, SCAMP would center itself and match the roll rate of the target.  Then, commands would be sent to SCAMP to thrust forward and close with the target, much like the famous scene in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.