Stability analysis of adaptive Jacobian controller for free-floating space manipulators

In this paper, we have presented an adaptive Jacobian tracking controller for free-floating space manipulators with uncertainties in both kinematics and dynamics. Due to the nonlinearly parametric nature of the dynamics of free-floating manipulators, the conventional linearly-parametric-model based adaptive control schemes cannot work. But here we do not perform controller design based on the conventional dynamics of free-floating space manipulators. Instead, we attempt to resolve this problem based on normal form augmentation approach. And we have also, for the first time, presented a complete stability analysis of the normal form augmentation based scheme. The applicability and the restriction of this approach has been discussed. Simulation results are presented to show the performance of the proposed controller.