Weekly Progress — Free-Flying Space Manipulator

Weekly Progress

Week of 1–8 July 2026

The error floor found its mechanism; the stability math found its kernel.

Week of 1–8 July 2026
Weekly Progress — Free-Flying Space Manipulator

The cruise error floor has a mechanism

Five fix-hypotheses falsified on committed evidence.

The ~0.14 m floor is an arc-anchored equilibrium error.

Speed- and gain-invariant: 0.150 → 0.137 m at half speed.

Remaining owner: one unmodeled channel.

Week of 1–8 July 2026
Weekly Progress — Free-Flying Space Manipulator

The floor's constraint is a singularity fence

The elbow pins at the fence ~99.5% of episode steps.

The fully-actuated base absorbs the denied motion.

Modeled static forcings close only 8–24% of the lag.

Tikhonov regularization floor: the pre-registered prime suspect.

Week of 1–8 July 2026
Weekly Progress — Free-Flying Space Manipulator

Mission clock: closed to 9.1%, inside the gate

Three terms close the 24 s residual.

Oracle bookkeeping + along-track bias + curvature coupling.

Derate path exonerated by an exact-zero test.

First end-to-end run of the design→sim→report chain.

Week of 1–8 July 2026
Weekly Progress — Free-Flying Space Manipulator

Startup: the teleport is gone

The 0.74 rad jump was a joint-limit clip.

The spawn posture was infeasible by its own envelope.

Born-in error 0.156 → 0.040 m; five baselines re-pinned.

Surviving ceiling: one coupled ring at 10.68 s.

Week of 1–8 July 2026
Weekly Progress — Free-Flying Space Manipulator

Stability math, machine-checked

81 kernel-clean theorems, 16 modules, one week.

The convergence claim (Prop IV.1) is sealed by two independent routes:

í

Every theorem depends only on

Class- + LaSalle layers: absent from Mathlib — contribution candidates.

Week of 1–8 July 2026
Weekly Progress — Free-Flying Space Manipulator

Roadmap: where we stand

Phase Subject Status
Pre-risk gate Nominal lockdown ◀ TODAY — blocked on error-floor closeout
Phase 0 Fragility yardstick, risk metrics, Σ Active; 46-run campaign not started
Phase A Camera-pose uncertainty, CVaR view scoring In design; derivation ratified
Phase B Estimated-state uncertainty, guidance Architected (2026-07-06)
Phase C Actuation uncertainty, control Architected (2026-07-06)
Phases D/E Objective extensions Architected; floats after A

Execution order stays 0 → A → B → C; D/E after A.

Week of 1–8 July 2026
Weekly Progress — Free-Flying Space Manipulator

The risk line is defense-ready before it runs

Phase B/C/D–E architectures landed this week.

Three defense memos, refuter-gated: 146/148 claims survived.

A palace audit surfaced nine unasked defense gaps.

Answers now exist before the questions arrive.

Week of 1–8 July 2026
Weekly Progress — Free-Flying Space Manipulator

The website delivers again

The daily-brief slot was stuck on July 1 — fixed.

New: 3D point-cloud viewer, Start Here page.

Figures now survive Firefox content blockers.

Everything cited this week is live there.

Week of 1–8 July 2026
Weekly Progress — Free-Flying Space Manipulator

Literature this week

  • Rockafellar & Uryasev 2000 — the CVaR foundation
  • Hakobyan et al. 2019 — CVaR motion planning, nearest prior art
  • Nemirovski & Shapiro 2006 — chance-constraint approximations
  • Ono et al. 2015 — chance-constrained space robotics
  • Connolly 1985; Scott et al. 2003 — next-best-view canon
  • Galceran & Carreras 2013 — coverage planning survey
  • El-Hawwary & Maggiore 2013 — reduction theorems, now formalized

Detail: the research wiki → inspection-ffsm.pages.dev/research

Week of 1–8 July 2026
Weekly Progress — Free-Flying Space Manipulator

Next week

  1. Unmodeled-channel autopsy (Tikhonov shave first)
  2. Ring modal autopsy at 10.68 s
  3. Final gold re-pin + mirror-posture flip
  4. Khalil OCR → classical stability proofs (rung 3)
  5. Defense memos for Tuesday
Week of 1–8 July 2026
Weekly Progress — Free-Flying Space Manipulator

For discussion

  1. The decomposition-gate sign flip: which post-June-12 derate change moved it?
  2. Accept ~0.14 m as the architectural floor, or keep hunting below 0.10 m?
  3. Risk uncertainty set: extend to mass/CoM/inertia drift?
  4. Is UR3-on-box a defensible Astrobee-class analog?
  5. The one-sentence novelty claim — ratify before it goes outward.
Week of 1–8 July 2026