Safe On-Orbit Dislodging of Deployable Structures via Robust Adaptive MPC

This paper proposes a novel robust adaptive model predictive controller for on-orbit dislodging. We study orbit dislodging where a servicing spacecraft uses a robotic arm to free a jammed and unactuated solar panel mounted on a hybrid hinge that acts as a time-varying client on a space station. Our method couples online set-membership identification with a robust adaptive MPC to enforce safety under bounded disturbances. The controller explicitly balances exploration to excite the system and shrink uncertainty and exploitation to improve control performance through a dual-mode cost. The feasibility of the developed robust adaptive MPC method is also examined through dislodging simulations and hardware experiments in freefall and terrestrial laboratory environments, respectively. In addition, the advantages of our method are shown through comparison experiments with several state-of-the-art control schemes for both accuracy of parameter estimation and control performance.