There has been a push for contact-rich manipulation in robotics, where meaningful and deliberate contact with the environment is required. By “meaningful,” we refer to purposeful interactions such as pushing a button, inserting a humidity sensor into soil, probing the temperature of a cake, or squeezing a bottle to grasp it. These tasks highlight the need for contact while demanding strict safety guarantees to prevent damage to objects, humans, or the robot. Traditional robot safety assumes contact should be avoided altogether, which constrains contact-rich tasks. As a result, controllers often operate with either reduced safety margins or with reduced velocity, thus decreasing the capabilities of the robot. An ideal controller operates the robot within the full safety margins and with minimal restrictions to its capabilities. This paper uses Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to ensure that contact with a surface is below a maximum safety velocity and the subsequent surface penetration is bounded, while allowing free movement when contact is not expected. We derive an exponentially decaying velocity–distance CBF and test it in a torque-controlled manipulator simulation. The simulation shows the manipulator slowing down to a safe contact speed and not exceeding the maximum allowed penetration, even when the nominal controller is unaware of the safety constraints. The results are promising and open the door to additional research in safety guarantees in contact with Control Barrier Functions.

This summary is about the highlights of the final design of the LAMP (Low Altitude Modular Platform). This report follows the project plan, baseline report and midterm report. This report presents the market analysis for the platform followed by the detailed design of the platform. The design of each subsystem is treated on its own after which the integration, manufacturing and operations of all subsystems are discussed. The low-altitude modular platform is a versatile satellite platform with a wide range of capabilities. It bridges the gap between small CubeSats and high-end Earth observational satellites, while also flying at 300 Km, enabling higher resolutions in a small form factor. While the market share of CubeSats has grown a lot in recent years, their capabilities are still limited. Due to practical constraints of miniaturisation, the spacecraft bus platform typically occupies approximately 50% to 80% of the total satellite internal volume. This problem is however remedied with the use of larger satellites, which is the market gap LAMP tries to occupy. It has both the advantages of standardisation, ease of production, and low cost of CubeSats, while also possessing a large payload fraction and the bus capabilities to accommodate a high-end earth observation payload. LAMP is also innovative in its communication capabilities: It is planned to be the first satellite platform to use the SpaceX Starlink constellation. This gives LAMP unparalleled communication capabilities for an earth observational satellite in its class. LAMP is capable of sending all the information of its design payload (the DST) in livelink. In certain orbits, it is even capable of streaming 1080p 60fps video live to Earth. This opens it for a great number of new applications related to civil, law enforcement, and military surveillance...