Flight Experiments of ETS-VII for Advanced Space Robot Control.

Abstract

This paper presents the flight experiments on the dynamics and control of a space robotic arm mounted on ETS-VII (Engineering Test Satellite VII). The experiments were successfully carried out to evaluate the performance of (1) reaction null-space based reactionless manipulation, (2) generalized Jacobian based inertial manipulation, (3) offset command based feedforward attitude control, and (4) bi-directional approach of non-holonomic path planning. Inertia parameters of ETS-VII is identified based on the momentum equation and the effect of gravity gradient torque is also evaluated.