ARGOS and Microgravity Free Flyer Evaluation

UNL's Microgravity Team will evaluate the ability of the Active Response Gravity Offload System (ARGOS) to provide a microgravity environment for a free-flying vehicle. ARGOS is a robotic system that provides reduced gravity environments through a large motion-based platform. It is a facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) that has been used for human and robotic testing over the past three years. However, ARGOS has not yet been used for testing free flyers. The UNL team will need to develop a free flyer (probably a quad or hexa-copter) to fly a specific set of motion patterns in both ARGOS and plane-induced microgravity environments, and the team will need to devise a related data collection method. The data collection should involve a combination of data sources that may include motion capture camera system and inertial guidance unit aspects. Parabolic flight maneuvers during Microgravity Flight Week should allow collection of a data set for comparison to the data collected with ARGOS. Ultimately, the data should allow the ARGOS system to be evaluated and the control system to be tuned for optimal free flyer performance.