Manipulation control of a space robot with flexible solar panels

Dynamics and control of a space robotic system with flexible appendages during a docking operation is studied here. Flexible appendages such as solar panels of a space free flying robotic system during a manoeuvre may get stimulated and vibrate. Therefore, such vibrations will cause some oscillatory disturbances on the moving base, which in turn produces error in the position and speed of the manipulating end-effectors. In this paper, first the system dynamics is partitioned into two rigid and flexible bodies´ motion, and a practical model for control implementations on compounded rigid-flexible multi-body systems is developed. Then, based on a designed path/trajectory for a space robotic system, the multiple impedance control and the augmented object model algorithm are extended to perform an object manipulation task by such complicated rigid-flexible multi-body systems. Finally, a space free flying robotic system is simulated during a docking operation which contains two 2-DOF planar manipulators, and a rotating antenna and a camera as its third and fourth arms, appended with two solar panels. Obtained results reveal the merits of the proposed model and developed controllers which will be discussed.