Attitude control of space robot by arm motion

Abstract

A path-planning method of a space robot manipulator arm is presented in this paper. The purpose of the path planning is to control the satellite's attitude by the arm's motion. The joint angles are expressed by two parameters and a relation between the attitude change and the motion of the parameters is derived. Based on this relation, an algorithm for the joint angle path to cause the desired attitude change is proposed. An attitude control measure is also introduced to show the difficulty of changing attitude by arm motion. Numerical studies are executed using a space robot model with a manipulator arm with six degrees of freedom. The result shows that there are some directions where the attitude change is easily achieved by the arm motion. The validity of the proposed algorithm is confirmed by numerical simulations.