Abstract
We in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University are developing an autonomous mobile robotic system to emulate six degree of freedom (DOF) relative spacecraft motion during proximity operations. The base uses an active split offset castor (ASOC) drive train to achieve omni-directional planar motion with desired tracking position errors in the ± 1 cm range and heading angle error in the ±0.5° range. With six independently controlled wheels, we achieve a nominally uniform motor torque distribution and reduce the total disturbances with system control redundancy. A CAD (Computer-aided Design) sketch of our onethird scale model prototype is shown.