Brandon Apodaca: Robotics PhD Defense

In a PhD defense for Michigan Robotics, Brandon Apodaca presents work on planning fuel-efficient, human-aware inspection trajectories for free-flying robots around orbital structures like the International Space Station. Current inspection methods, including exterior cameras and robotic arms, leave blind spots that require risky astronaut spacewalks. Apodaca's work tackles this by developing a complete inspection pipeline: RRTZ, a sampling-based path planner adapted for zero-gravity environments that minimizes fuel cost by flipping the node-edge structure of traditional RRT planners; a trajectory generation framework that solves a viewpoint planning, orbital traveling salesman, and optimal control problem to produce Pareto-optimal trajectories balancing fuel consumption and inspection coverage; and a human-in-the-loop system for anomaly detection, since automated perception algorithms still produce false positives and miss edge cases. Apodaca presented this defense, "In-Orbit Human-aware Space Structure Inspection Trajectory Generation", on March 9, 2026. More on... Brandon Apodaca: https://bapodacaumich.github.io University of Michigan Robotics: https://robotics.umich.edu