This paper describes a prototype robot and the necessary path planning and control for space inspection applications. The robot is the first generation of a free-flying robotic camera that will assist astronauts in constructing and maintaining the Space Station. The robot will provide remote views to astronauts inside the Space Shuttle and future Space Station, and to ground controllers. The paper describes a planar robot prototype autonomously moving about an air bearing table, and introduces a method for determining paths in three-dimensions for efficient fuel use. Finally, the paper describes the software simulation of the path planner with the future Space Station.

This paper describes the innovative use of a genetic algorithm to solve the grasp synthesis problem for multifingered robot hands. The goal of our algorithm is to select a 'best' grasp of an object, given some information about the object geometry and some user-defined 'fitness functions' which intuitively delineate 'good' from 'bad' grasp qualities. The fitness functions are used by the specially designed genetic algorithm, which iteratively selects the grasp. The approach is biologically inspired both in the use of the genetic algorithm to 'evolve' populations of candidate grasps, and in the choice of fitness functions, which adapt intuition from nature to guide the evolution process.