Deformable Cargo Transport in Microgravity with Astrobee

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