The Future of ISAM in the UK: Upgrading and Innovating in Westcott

The Catapult is entering a very exciting period as our project team rapidly close off several major milestones for our In-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (ISAM) Facility upgrade project. September will see our facility re-open after a period of closure to complete a series of upgrades that will enable the facility to better serve the UK and beyond for simulating in-orbit operations.

These improvements have been made possible by a £2m grant from the UK Space Agency.  Ray Fielding, head of Sustainability & ADR at the Agency, said “The upgrades to the ISAM test facilities at Westcott provide unique capabilities in the UK where companies can verify, validate and demonstrate a range of in-orbit operations, elevating it to a world-class facility.”

This is a great opportunity to reflect on and share some of the achievements of the past year.

Upgrading the Space

The video above shows some of the physical changes to our robotics yard, including the reconfiguration of our robots and track, updating safety systems, and optimising the camera-based positioning system – as well as the electrical work that facilitates all of this. These upgrades not only make the yard more versatile, but also lay the groundwork for a significant behind-the-scenes effort in our digital infrastructure which will take our ISAM capabilities to the next level.

This new configuration also leaves room for our orbital lighting and gravity compensation systems, which will emulate a variety of pre-defined and custom lightning conditions that spacecraft would encounter in orbit, enabling a greater variety of testing environments.

Digital Innovations

One of the updates that will have the biggest impact on users of our facility is a complete overhaul of how our software “talks” to our robots. Communication now occurs using ROS, a widely used interface which many of our yard users will be familiar with which will mean our robotics team can spend more time modelling in-orbit operations and less time translating from one robotics software to another.

This modelling will also be supported by our new digital twins of our robotics yard and lab, which are a series of digital models which integrate a simulated environment with real-world hardware. This means experiments can be set up and tested digitally – and with machine learning our team will even be able to optimise your ISAM operations before a single command gets sent to the robots.

As well as optimising the camera placement for our positioning system, upgrades to the system have enabled a much higher degree of accuracy – far beyond what these industrial robots were designed for. In the image above, you can see the sub-millimetre accuracy that can be afforded by the positioning system, meaning that when companies test at our yard they can be confident that their operations are within their defined margins.

The Future for ISAM

Whilst an enormous amount of effort has gone into the upgrades so far, there is still a lot more to come on this project. One of the most exciting developments is a new contact dynamics system for the robotics yard. This new physics engine will mean that our robots can fully emulate physical interactions in low earth orbit, with a slight nudge whilst attempting to dock potentially sending your target careening away – just as it would in space.

When this upgrade project is completed in March 2025, this will present a significant boost to the UK’s ISAM industry, meaning Westcott will house the most advanced facility of this kind in the UK and rival world-leading facilities in Europe and the USA. You can find out more about ISAM capabilities at Satellite Applications Catapult by clicking here.

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This project is funded by the UK Space Agency.