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Autonomous Path Planning and Experiment Study of Free-floating Space Robot for Target Capturing

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Abstract

Space robotic systems are expected to play an increasingly important role in the future. The robotic on-orbital service, whose key is the capturing technology, becomes research hot in recent years. In this paper, the authors propose an autonomous path planning method for target capturing. The task is described in Cartesian space and it can drive the manipulator to approach the target along the closest path. Firstly, the target feature is extracted based on the measured information via the hand-eye camera, and the target pose (position and orientation) and velocities (linear velocity and angular velocity) are estimated using Kalman filtering technology. Then, a numerically feasible approach is presented to plan the manipulator motion and avoid the dynamic singularities, which are transformed into real-time kinematic singularities avoiding problem. Thirdly, the potential disturbance on the base due to the manipulator’s motion is estimated, and the joint rates are autonomously adjusted to reduce the disturbance if it is beyond the allowed bound. At last, a ground experiment system is set up based on the concept of dynamic emulation and kinematic equivalence. With the experiment system, the autonomous target capturing experiments are conducted. The experiment results validate the proposed algorithm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Space Intelligent System, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, People’s Republic of China

    Wenfu Xu, Yu Liu, Bin Liang & Wenyi Qiang

  2. Department of Automation and Computer-Aided Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China

    Yangsheng Xu

Authors
  1. Wenfu Xu
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  2. Yu Liu
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  3. Bin Liang
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  4. Yangsheng Xu
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  5. Wenyi Qiang
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Correspondence to Wenfu Xu.

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Xu, W., Liu, Y., Liang, B. et al. Autonomous Path Planning and Experiment Study of Free-floating Space Robot for Target Capturing. J Intell Robot Syst 51, 303–331 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-007-9192-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-007-9192-3

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