Swarming robots to tackle space debris - European Space Agency
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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.
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