Autonomous capturing of moving target with optimal rendezvous attitude and manipulator configuration

Robotic capturing of target is one of the key technologies for on-orbital servicing. The target may move from the outside of the workspace, and its trajectory may not cross the "guaranteed workspace" (GWS). In this paper, we propose a coordinated method to plan the motions of the base attitude and manipulator joints for autonomous rendezvous with and capturing a moving target. First, we analyzed the workspace of the space robot and discussed the capturing problem for different cases. Then we presented the concept of optimal capturing, i.e., the capturing with the "optimal rendezvous attitude" and the "optimal capturing configuration". An autonomous method was used to realize the optimal capturing. This method has these traits: (1) it can generate coordinated motion of the base and the manipulator to capture moving target; (2) the reaction jet fuel is not used; and (3) the manipulator captures the target with most dexterous configuration. Simulation results verify the proposed method.