Task planning and simulation platform for on-orbit service multi-robot system

Autonomous On-orbit Service (OOS) is one of the key issues in aerospace technology nowadays. Since multi-robot system, which consists of several low-cost and simple robots, can work more efficiently and robustly than a single and complicated robot, we consider introducing multi-robot system into autonomous OOS. This paper focuses on the topic of task planning in multi-robot system, and takes advantage of expert system to solve this problem. We develop a new expert system called KICNP-S and a simulation platform called JavaRobot, which can simulate a group of intelligent robots performing OOS corporately. The simulation results show that expert system is competent in solving task planning problem, and we only need to modify the knowledge database when conditions of tasks change. Finally, simulation of a simplified OOS task is presented in which up to 13 robots repair a breakdown satellite.