Self-Balancing Free Flying 3D Underactuated Robot for zero-g Object Capture

Abstract

This project is aimed at studying, designing and realizing an anthropomorphic robot with a free floating base. The goal is to control the robot aimed at reaching every position of his working space minimizing one generalized displacement relating to one of the degrees of freedom of the robot base without any thruster action. The innovative aspect is that the experiment is performed in a 3D dimensional space at zero-g using a robot which has a floating base. The base is characterized by inertia and mass of the same order of the robotic arm. This peculiarity produces a considerable dynamic coupling and possible failure of conventional manipulator control law. The challenge is to compensate the arm movements without using thrusters. The paper reports results of simulations and data obtained on parabolic flight experiments illustrating the experimental test-bed. This work presents progresses and results obtained by means of a free-flying space robot prototype developed for space extra vehicular activity (EVA) and for space servicing missions.

A Fuzzy Logic Approach Used in the Inverse Kinematic Algorithm of a Space Zero-G Free Flying Robot

“…In an experiment performed with a free-floating robot that was tested during the Sixth Student Parabolic Flight Campaign sponsored by the ESA (Menon, 2003;Menon, 2004;Cocuzza, 2004;Menon, 2005) we have proved the real possibility of keeping the robot base stationary during arm operations with a K c matrix fixed. This work is an improvement of the experimental results: the main purpose of the proposed solution is to handle the K c matrix during the trajectory evolution and controls any instability that can be induced to the system.…”

“…where q is the vector of joint positions (arm and base), J AG is the Analytic Generalized Jacobian (Umetani, 1989;Menon, 2003), J AG + is its pseudoinverse, e is error of the end-effector (the difference between desired and real position), x d is the desired position and orientation of working space, K p and K c are gain matrixes (K c is positive definite), I is the identity matrix, J c is the Jacobian associated to the constraint task error, e c is the error of the constraint task defined as e c =q bd -q b where q b is a generalized position variable of the free floating base of the robot that is constrained to the desired trajectory q bd . The matrix (I − J AG + J AG ) projects the joint velocity contribution into the null space of the generalized Jacobian in order to separate the constraint and endeffector tasks.…”

“…This work follows an experimental phase in which our working group has built a free-floating robot that was tested during the Sixth Student Parabolic Flight Campaign sponsored by the ESA (Menon, 2003;Menon, 2004;Cocuzza, 2004;Menon, 2005).…”

Least-Squares-Based Reaction Control of Space Manipulators

“…The robotic arm used in this study was previously designed to perform experiments on ESA parabolic flights [55,[57][58][59]; therefore, it can operate in zero gravity in a three-dimensional workspace. The robot links have a modular and symmetrical design: this allows the increasing or decreasing of the number of links and the modification of the orientation of the joint rotation axes.…”