  This paper presents a first contribution to the design of a small aerial
robot for inhabited microgravity environments, such as orbiting space stations.
In particular, we target a fleet of robots for collaborative tasks with humans,
such as telepresence and cooperative mobile manipulation. We explore a
propeller based propulsion system, arranged in such a way that the
translational and the rotational components can be decoupled, resulting in an
holonomic hexarotor. Since propellers have limited thrust, we employ an
optimization approach to select the geometric configuration given a criteria of
uniform maximum thrust across all directions in the body reference frame. We
also tackle the problem of motion control: due to the decoupling of
translational and rotational modes we use separate converging controllers for
each one of these modes. In addition, we present preliminary simulation results
in a realistic simulator, in closed loop with the proposed controller, thus
providing a first validation of the followed methodology.
