Resembling a brightly coloured artwork, a virtual environment software replicates the real-life setup shown right behind the screen – a group of robotic platforms hovering over an extremely flat floor. While the real setup includes only three objects, the screen displays three more virtual ones alongside them.
The minds behind this experiment are part of Star-bots, a student team from the University of Bologna, Italy. They are one of the teams selected for this year’s edition of the ESA Academy Experiments Programme, which gives students access to testing facilities and technical guidance.
The Star-bots team’s project tackles the issue of space debris. The number of non-functional objects in space is growing – some are satellites that have reached the end of their lifetime, ran out of fuel, or have collided with others and broke up into smaller pieces.
The team’s experiment addresses this by testing how a swarm of autonomous robots could help with active debris removal, a process of cleaning up non-functional objects from space by grabbing onto them and changing their orbit to reenter the atmosphere and burn up.
“Our experiment involves a swarm of five robots, which together encircle and track a tumbling, non-cooperative object,” explains Carlo Dallara from the team. “To test our system, we are using a mix of real and virtual robotic platforms, which must all work together autonomously. This approach allows us to simulate large-scale swarm behaviour while maintaining the feedback of real robotic hardware.”
The ESA Academy Experiments Programme provided the students with access to ESA’s Orbital Robotics Laboratory at ESTEC, the agency’s technical centre in the Netherlands. Here, they used specialised floating platforms to simulate their swarm.
The bottom of each platform is equipped with air bearings that blow air out towards the floor to create a micrometre-scale air gap, making the platforms and their payloads float without any friction. Using this simulated state of weightless free-floating in two dimensions, Star-bots were able to test their system in a setting that closely mirrors the dynamics of space.