Compensation of base disturbance using optimal trajectory planning of dual-manipulators in a space robot

This paper presents a trajectory planning algorithm for a space robot with dual-manipulators. Here one manipulator of the space robot captures a target, and another manipulator is free. In this case, this study uses one manipulator as the mission manipulator to capture the target, and another as the balance manipulator aiming at the compensation of the pose disturbance. For this method, a novel trajectory planning algorithm applied to the balance manipulator is presented. The trajectory planning problem is transformed into series of problems of the optimal state solution, and then the iterative algorithms for the trajectory planning are designed. In the iterative algorithms, the bias force on the spacecraft base caused by the balance manipulator is used as the compensation force. Then, to calculate the expected compensation force and torque, a pose control law for the spacecraft base is introduced. The expected compensation force and torque provide equality constraints for optimization problems, which implies that the trajectory planning algorithm compensates for not only the disturbance generated by the manipulator’s motion, but also environmental disturbances. This is because the expected compensation force and torque depend on the pose change of the spacecraft base rather than the type of the disturbance. Numerical simulation was carried out to analyze the proposed trajectory planning method. It was observed that the method greatly reduces the disturbance of Manipulator A on the spacecraft base. These results validated the effectiveness of the proposed method for the trajectory planning to make the spacecraft base disturbance up to minimum.