Bio-inspired anti-impact manipulator for capturing non-cooperative spacecraft: theory and experiment

On-orbit capture of non-cooperative targets, i.e., malfunctioning satellites and space debris, is nowadays an urgent task. It is also a challenging task since the states of the non-cooperative targets are essentially unknown and have to be estimated by real-time visual detection. In the final approach stage, inevitable time-delay and measurement errors of the visual detection may cause a sudden impact between the servicing spacecraft and target,...