Positioning and motion control for soft docking of adaptive space structure based on artificial potential method

Abstract

This paper presents an extension of our previous analyses on the soft docking of adaptive space structures based on the Artificial Potential Method (APM). In the previous studies, improving the artificial potential and the additional control input of the APM, we proposed control laws for the point-topoint movement of the end-effector of both a space robot and a variable geometry truss (VGT) structure. Here, we will further improve the APM to propose a motion control by taking into account a desired velocity schedule in the artificial potential. Numerical simulation has shown that the proposed method is very effective in controlling the end-effector to dock a target in a soft and smooth way along an assigned straight path with no precontact.