Agent-Based Design of Fault Tolerant Manipulators for Satellite Docking

A rapidly deployable fault tolerant manipulator system consists of modular hardware and support software that allow the user to quickly configure and deploy a fault tolerant manipulator that is custom-tailored for a given task. The main focus of this paper is on the Task Based Design component of such a system; that is, the determination of the optimal manipulator configuration, its base position, and the corresponding joint space trajectory for a given task. We introduce a novel agent-based solution approach to task based design and illustrate it with a fault tolerant manipulator design for a satellite docking operation aboard the space shuttle.