Cleaning up space: University of Bologna students head to ESA to test robot "sweeper" teams in orbit

Teams of robot "sweepers" will operate beyond our atmosphere, clearing Earth's orbits of drifting debris and ensuring the safety of space missions. The idea comes from STAR-BOTS, a group of eight engineering students from the University of Bologna who will put the project to the test in the laboratories of ESA, the European Space Agency.

The University of Bologna team has been selected to carry out experiments at the Orbital Robotics Laboratory, a prestigious facility within ESTEC, ESA's research centre in the Netherlands. The project forms part of the ESA Academy Experiments Programme, an educational initiative that selects students’ teams from universities across Europe to test experimental projects in the European Space Agency's official laboratories. The University of Bologna group passed an extremely competitive evaluation process, culminating in a Selection Workshop held at ESTEC.

"With our project, we want to tackle the ambitious challenge of designing intelligent orbital robots for complex tasks such as space debris removal," explains Giuseppe Notarstefano, Full Professor of Automatic Control and Robotics at the "Guglielmo Marconi" Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering at the University of Bologna, who coordinates the student team. "The idea is to develop multi-robot orbital systems through cooperative decision-making and control algorithms, testing them under realistic conditions that include both virtual and physical experiments in ESA laboratories."

The official experimental campaign will take place from 7 to 18 September at ESA's Orbital Robotics Lab, where the students will have access to state-of-the-art infrastructure that replicates microgravity conditions and includes orbital robotic platforms.

"We will make the robots float on air cushions to emulate the dynamics of orbital motion in a controlled environment," says Carlo Dallara, the team's project leader. "The goal is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the robotic control systems we have designed and are currently developing in Bologna."

The University of Bologna team includes PhD students (Carlo Dallara and Andrea Drudi), students from the second cycle/two-year master's degree programme in Automation Engineering (Francesco Cenni, Giacomo Pezzolati, Simone Bernardi) and from the Bachelor's degree programme in Computer Engineering (Gianluca Parri, Giacomo Nobili and Marco Roca). This collaboration reaffirms the University of Bologna's standing as a leading centre for academic and scientific innovation in the field of space robotics.