Attitude Control of a Space Robot by the Arm Motion

Abstract

Attitude control of a space robot by the manipulator arm is considered in this paper. For the purpose, we give an effective algorithm to find the arm trajectory from the initial posture of the arm to the final posture identical to the initial one. The criterion of the algorithm is to suppress the arm motion. From the algorithm, we introduce a measure to evaluate the easiness of the attitude control by the arm motion. Numerical study is executed to examine the value of the measure for every direction of the attitude change. The result shows that there is no direction where the attitude change is extremely difficult. Numerical simulation is also executed to verify that the proposed trajectory gives the desired attitude change.