Speaker
Dr
Josep Virgili
(Naval Postgraduate School)
Description
A wide range of space missions require a robotic arm (e.g. satellite servicing, active debris removal and berthing). The kinematics and dynamics of space manipulators are highly non-linear and differ considerably from their terrestrial counterparts. The base-spacecraft is not anchored to the ground and thus it is free to react to the manipulator's motion, making the modeling and control of space-based manipulators a complex task. The base-manipulator interaction is stronger when the mass and inertia of the manipulator and of the base-spacecraft are comparable. Therefore, the difference between space and terrestrial manipulators tends to become more acute on manipulators mounted on small spacecraft.
There is a wealth of literature tackling the subject of spacecraft manipulators modeling and control but each research group has typically developed its own code in order to simulate and validate control approaches. In an attempt to help speed the process and make space manipulators a more accessible research topic an open-source kinematics, dynamics and control simulator for space based robotic arms has been developed.
The simulator is written in MATLAB/ Simulink and it can be used for standalone MATLAB scripts and Simulink models. The Simulink models can subsequently be used for automatic code-generation and compiled to run in real-time on the selected target hardware. This open-source code is thus suitable from prototyping work all the way to hardware implementation.
The six degrees-of-freedom simulator is capable of computing the homogeneous coordinate transformation matrices, the velocity Jacobians, the combined inertia matrices and the velocity terms (using the Lagrangian approach) as well as the joint and base reaction using the Newton-Euler approach. Several control manipulator and base-spacecraft control approaches have also already been implemented.
The architecture and usage of the simulator will be presented as well as some examples that demonstrate how the simulator performs under some basic manipulator control applications. Finally an implementation example, on a real-time embedded hardware on an experimental test-bed, will be provided.
| Applicant type | First author |
|---|
Primary author
Dr
Josep Virgili
(Naval Postgraduate School)
Co-authors
Mr
Jerry Drew
(Naval Postgraduate School)
Prof.
Marcello Romano
(Naval Postgraduate School)
