Hirohiko Arai and Kazuo Tanie

Abstract:
Disturbance compensation control of a free-flying space robot is considered in this paper. In the method proposed here, disturbances imposed on a nominal dynamic model are estimated and compensated by utilizing a combination of joint torque input and acceleration signals. The dynamics of the equivalent manipulator with a fixed base is treated as the nominal model, noting that the mass of the base satellite is usually much larger than that of the manipulator. The attitude of the base satellite changes because of the reaction force generated by the manipulator. However, the influence of the change is estimated and compensated as a disturbance based on a combination of the joint torque and the acceleration of the end-effector in the operational coordinate frame. Computation of the proposed control method is as simple as the control of a manipulator with a fixed base. The proposed method is robust against unknown disturbances and modeling errors. This method can also be extended to the case of a space robot with multiple manipulators and attitude control of the base satellite. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by computer simulations.

Keywords: Free-flying robot, Disturbance estimation, Disturbance compensation