arXiv:2610.27141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable contact establishment remains a critical challenge for autonomous on-orbit servicing (OOS), particularly when interacting with non-cooperative targets. Gecko-inspired dry adhesives provide a lightweight, passive, and residue-free solution for robotic capture in space, yet current systems operate in open loop, without the ability to estimate their own contact or adhesion state during interaction. This paper presents a real-time interaction-awareness framework that enables sensorized gecko-inspired adhesive interfaces to estimate their contact state throughout the adhesion lifecycle using embedded capacitive sensing. Five discrete interaction states (idle, proximity, contact, engaged, and disengaged) are classified using experimentally collected and augmented sensor data, enabling a comparative evaluation of six lightweight machine learning models suitable for embedded deployment. Among the evaluated models, Random Forest achieved ...