Experimental demonstration of singularity avoidance with trajectories based on the Bézier curves for free-floating manipulator

Abstract

Path planning problem for a free-floating space manipulator can be solved in Cartesian space. In such approach, inverse kinematics is solved on the velocity level using the manipulator Jacobian, but dealing with dynamic singularities may be problematic. In this study, we present application of the Bézier curves for path planning. Modifications of curve shape allow avoidance of singularities. The selection of the Bézier curve parameters responsible for its shape is intuitive and simple. The demonstration of the proposed method was performed for a real system using planar air-bearing microgravity simulator. Experimental results are in agreement with the results of the numerical simulations. * 1 1 J J Ad M Ad Ad M Ad q J  

Manipulator trajectories during orbital servicing mission: numerical simulations and experiments on microgravity simulator

“…Among many other techniques for trajectory planning in the Cartesian coordinates, the use of parametric curves (such as cubic B‚ ezier curves) as manipulator trajectories seems advantageous [8]. The shape of the curve can be conveniently adjusted by modi¦cation of curve parameters and trajectories that avoid singularities can be found.…”

“…In this section, application of the B‚ ezier curves for trajectory planning (introduced and described in detailes in [8]) is presented. Use of the B‚ ezier curves for trajectory planning is less computationally demanding than trajectory optimization presented in subsection 3.2.…”

Singularity Maps of Space Robots and their Application to Gradient-based Trajectory Planning

“…Trajectories resulting from motion planners for free-floating systems are typically defined by smooth continuous functions, e.g. polynomials, Bezier curves, and B-Splines [19,29,34]. In the most general setting, a planner optimizes the parameters of such functions, in the attempt to globally minimize a given cost function while satisfying motion constraints.…”

Estimation of Vibration Characteristics of a Space Manipulator From Air Bearing Supported Test Data

“…Among the existing ground test facilities, the air bearing testbed has been widely used due to its simple structure, long simulation time, and the least influence of resistance and reaction force (Wilde et al, 2019 ). Many air bearing testbeds have been built and used for hardware testing (Rybus and Seweryn, 2016 ; Mantellato et al, 2017 ) and control algorithm verification (Cocuzza et al, 2010 , 2011 ; Rybus et al, 2013 ) in zero-gravity condition. Functional prototypes were designed and tested by air bearing facilities for various applications.…”