A Multi-Robot Experimental Platform for Emulating Autonomous On-Orbit Servicing

This paper presents a novel multi-robot testbed designed to emulate critical phases of on-orbit servicing, enabling safe, repeatable, and cost-effective validation of autonomous guidance and control strategies. The testbed features a dual-gantry system providing a prismatic axis and is equipped with two 6-DOF industrial robotic arms, forming a seven-axis platform capable of applying controlled forces and torques in arbitrary directions within 3D space. To replicate real-world mechanical anomalies commonly encountered in space servicing missions, the system includes a modular hybrid-hinge payload that generates multi-stable stiction profiles, representative of jammed solar panels and stuck antenna booms. The paper first introduces the mechanical and software architecture of the testbed, then presents results from advanced control strategies addressing (i) safe and interactive dislodging of a solar panel using a probabilistic approach to stiction compensation, validated in both high-fidelity simulation and hardware experiments, and (ii) contact-based detumbling of a client satellite via a repeated-impact dual-arm strategy evaluated in planar MuJoCo simulations to expose key constraints and requirements for future on-hardware emulation.