Design, kinematics and trajectory planning of cable-driven space manipulator

Space manipulators are important tools for on-orbit services. Rigid space manipulator is difficult to meet the requirements of operation in complex and narrow environments due to its large size, large mass and poor flexibility. Therefore, this paper designs a lightweight cable-driven dexterous space manipulator characterized by rear actuator placement, modularity, and underactuation. Then, a multi-level kinematic model among the motor, cable, joint and end-effector is established by utilizing the geometric method and the homogeneous transformation method. On this basis, an adaptive Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is proposed to solve the inverse kinematics and trajectory planning problems of the single segment. Then, to control the arm shape of the segment, a deformation control equation is established based on the constant curvature method. Finally, an objective function incorporating motion smoothness is introduced, and an adaptive differential evolution hybrid (ADEH) algorithm is proposed, achieving the kinematic inverse solution and trajectory planning of cable-driven space manipulator (CDSM) with multi-segment. The simulation results show that the proposed approaches are effective and the trajectory planning algorithm presents high efficiency and accuracy.