SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTATION OF A TWO-BODY HOPPING MANEUVER WITH NASA ASTROBEE

Hopping maneuvers offer a novel approach to propellantless maneuvering of small robotic spacecraft operating in the vicinity of other spacecraft or masses. The ongoing Astrobatics project, using NASA's Astrobee free-flyer as a test platform, seeks to develop a method by which the Astrobee robot may maneuver around the International Space Station (ISS) using only its robotic arm and gripper. This thesis furthers the research by focusing on the third experimental session in the project, which involves a two-body hopping maneuver in which a primary Astrobee will perform a hopping maneuver off of a secondary, passive Astrobee. A MATLAB simulation of the maneuver has been developed to analyze the two-body hopping problem, and the results are compared with experimental maneuvers conducted on the Naval Postgraduate School's POSEIDYN testbed and the NASA Ames granite table laboratory, which concluded with an experiment test activity aboard the ISS. Despite several points in the experiment that can be improved, the data comparison is promising. Magnitude and direction of the launch velocity of the primary Astrobee appear to be correlated to the release angle and are consistent with simulation results. Future work on Astrobatics will likely be able to predict the Astrobee response to variations of the two-body hopping maneuver using simulated predictions.