Dynamic Modeling and Improved Nonlinear Model Predictive Control of a Free-Floating Dual-Arm Space Robot

Abstract

With the increasing demand for space missions, space robots have become the focus of research and attention. As a typical representative, the free-floating dual-arm space robot has the characteristics of multiple degrees of freedom, a floating base, and dynamic coupling between the manipulator and the base, so its modeling and control are very challenging. To address these challenges, a novel dynamic modeling and control method is proposed for a free-floating dual-arm space robot. First, an explicit dynamic model of a free-floating dual-arm space robot is established based on the explicit canonical multi-rigid-body dynamic modeling theory and combined with the concept of a dynamic equivalent manipulator. The establishment process of this model is not only simple and canonical to avoid the definition and calculation of many intermediate variables, but the symbolic result expression of the model also has the characteristics of iteration, which is convenient for computer automatic modeling. Next, aiming at addressing the problem of trajectory tracking and the base attitude stability of a free-floating dual-arm space robot with parameter perturbation and external disturbance, an improved nonlinear model predictive control method introducing the idea of sliding mode variable structure is proposed. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed controller has better robustness than the traditional nonlinear model predictive controller. Then, an in-orbit service task is designed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic modeling and control strategy of the free-floating dual-arm space robot. Finally, the dynamic modeling and control methods proposed are discussed and summarized. The proposed methods can not only realize the tracking of the desired trajectory of the arms of the free-floating space robot, but can also realize the stable control of the base of the free-floating space robot. This paper provides new insights into the difficult problems regarding the dynamics and control of free-floating dual-arm space robots.