FLOATS: Flexible Light-weight On-orbit Actuator Simulation

Kurzfassung

Robotic systems for intra-vehicular space operations must safely navigate and interact within confined, sensitive spacecraft environments. While traditional rigid free-flyers offer reliable mobility, they lack the adaptability and passive safety of soft robots. Soft continuum systems promise safer interactions and greater flexibility but remain underexplored in microgravity, where the absence of reaction forces makes their dynamics hard to model and control. To address this gap, we introduce FLOATS, a simulation framework for free-flying soft robots in microgravity. FLOATS facilitates realistic simulation of locomotion, manipulation, and planning for deformable on-orbit systems. We demonstrate grasping, free-floating object reconfiguration, and mobile manipulation tasks as a baseline for research on soft robotics planning and control in microgravity.