Design and Dynamical Analysis of a Novel 6-DOF Spacecraft Maneuvering System Using Robotic Manipulator-Based Thruster System

Abstract

This paper presents a novel six-degrees-of-freedom spacecraft maneuvering system which consists of two thrusters mounted on robotic manipulators, eliminating the need for additional actuators. The proposed system addresses the Δv requirement of fixed configuration of thrusters by leveraging manipulator kinematics for optimizing fuel consumption. The coupling between the spacecraft dynamics and robotic manipulator dynamics introduces loop dynamics during the control design. We provide a detailed dynamical analysis of the system and establish the stability of the loop dynamics using Lyapunov stability criterion. Subsequently, we design and analyze cascaded feedback control laws to stabilize the entire system and establish criterion for its full actuation. The latter part of the paper focuses on a systematic design optimization process to determine the optimal configuration of the robotic manipulators. The design objective is to enable the system to generate an arbitrary wrench for the spacecraft. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the optimized system. Numerical simulations are performed to validate the efficacy of both the system and the control design.