Space robot motion planning in the presence of nonconserved linear and angular momenta

Abstract

On-orbit servicing, active debris removal or assembling large structures on orbit are only some of the tasks that could be accomplished by space robots. In all these cases, a contact between a space robot and the satellite being serviced, deorbited, or assembled will occur. This contact results in a contact force exerted on the space robot, and therefore momenta of the space robot system are no longer conserved. Most of the papers that are concerned with motion planning problems of a space robot manipulator either consider that no external forces or moments are acting on the space robot system or use additional controllers when the space robot is subjected to external forces and moments. Such a controller minimizes end-effector position and orientation errors caused by the changes in system momenta due to external forces and moments acting on this system. The novelty of this work is that it proposes a new method for planning the motion of dual-arm space robot manipulators when linear and angular momenta of the space robot system are not conserved due to external forces and moments acting on the space robot base or/and manipulators' end-effectors. In the proposed method the changes in system momenta are considered, but no additional controllers are needed. In this paper, we derive the motion planning equations for dual-arm space robot manipulators, where external forces and moments are acting on both satellite and manipulator end-effectors. The proposed method has been verified by numerical simulations, and the results are presented and discussed.

A fault-tolerant and robust controller using model predictive path integral control for free-flying space robots

“…where p and L are linear and angular momentums, which are constant values. The free-floating space robots are divided into two sub-types where the initial momentum is zero or no-zero ( Nanos and Papadopoulos, 2011 ; Basmadji et al., 2020 ). In this study, the debris site is outside the reach of the spacecraft robot.…”

1U-Sized Deployable Space Manipulator for Future On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing

“…CubeSat locates and tracks the target debris and then releases Cubot to conduct the capture mission. CubeSat deorbits and drags it into graveyard orbits when the target is captured [33,34]. Considering the size of Cubot, the farthest distance of opposite fingers is 80 mm while the biggest gap of adjacent fingers is 56 mm, so the size range of debris is about 50 mm-75 mm.…”

Trajectory Optimization and Control of a Free-Floating Two-Arm Humanoid Robot

“…In [29] and [30], an optimal motion planning and control scheme is presented for a space manipulator to achieve momentum dissipation of a grasped tumbling satellite in minimum time or minimum energy. The motion planning problem of dual-arm space robot manipulators in the presence of external forces and moments acting on the space robot system is also addressed in [31]. A quantum genetic algorithm is used in [32] to solve the optimization problem to attain the optimized joints' trajectories in a similar scenario.…”