A Motion Planning Method Based Vision Servo for Free-Flying Space Robot Capturing a Tumbling Satellite

This paper presents a motion planning scheme for free-flying space robot capturing the tumbling target. And a tracking method of manipulator based vision servo is proposed. The target is in nutational motion. The pose of the target's docking ring can be measured by the manipulator's hand-eye cameras. The motion planning of manipulator in Cartesian Space is based on Euler Angle and Homogeneous matrix. It plans the motion arbitrarily and smoothly in six-axis. Compared with the classical position-based visual servo (PBVS) method, it's relatively simpler and can accomplish the capture within the specified time. The algorithm of visual measurement and the position-based inverse kinematics can avoid the singularities effectively. And the interpolation algorithm in the joint space is needed due to the different cycle, the visual measurement 100ms, the manipulator's controller 2ms. A detailed motion planning and control scheme of free-flying space robot is established. A set of numerical experiments by MSC ADAMS®/SIMULINK® co-simulation verify the validity and feasibility of the proposed approach.