ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Space Robotics
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2025.1565837
This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Robotics for Lunar Exploration and On-Orbit ServicingView all 3 articles
Parametric Modeling of Deformable Linear Objects for Robotic Outfitting and Maintenance of Space Systems
Provisionally accepted
- 1Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, United States
- 2Langley Research Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Hampton, Virginia, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Outfitting and maintenance are important to an in-space architecture consisting of long duration missions. During such missions, crew is not continuously present; robotic agents become essential to the construction, maintenance, and servicing of complicated space assets, requiring some degree of autonomy to plan and execute tasks. There has been significant research into manipulation planning for rigid elements for in-space assembly and servicing, but flexible electrical cables, which fall under the domain of Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs), have not received such attention despite being critical components of powered space systems. Cables often have a non-zero bend equilibrium configuration, which the majority of DLO research does not consider. This article implements a model-based optimization approach to estimate cable configuration, where a design parameter of the model's discretization level enables trading model accuracy vs. computational complexity. Observed 2D cable configurations are used to improve the model via parameter estimation. The parameter estimation is validated through comparing predicted configurations based on estimated parameters to that of a real cable. The incorporation of parameter estimation to the cable model is shown to reduce prediction errors by an order of magnitude. The results of this work demonstrate some of the challenges present with robotic cable manipulation, exploring the complexities of outfitting and maintenance operations of in-space facilities, and puts forth a method for reducing the size of the state space of a cable payload while accounting for non-zero equilibrium configurations.
Keywords: Deformable linear objects, Robotic outfitting, Model based state estimation, In-space construction, Lunar outfitting, parameter estimation
Received: 23 Jan 2025; Accepted: 07 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Quartaro, Moser, Cooper and Komendera. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Amy Quartaro, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.