Industrial Robotics for Spacecraft Rendezvous and Docking Simulation

Abstract

It is to be expected that space robotics systems will develop more and more in the future spatial applications. One of the most challenging and risky missions for spacecraft is to perform autonomously Rendezvous and Docking (RvD) in space. This paper describes a hardware-in-the-loop RvD simulation facility which uses two ABB industrial robots to simulate the 6-DOF dynamic manoeuvring of the rendezvous process. Firstly, we also simulate the real robots and we deduce the kinematic and dynamic equations of space robotic system, then the trajectory is planned. The target motion is reduced only to the movement of the end-effector, but the chaser’s motion is based on the plan which solves the inverse kinematic equations, considering the movement limitations of the joints. Finally, a 3D simulation system was developed to evaluate the proposed method using Matlab/ Simulink environment. Simulation results verified the corresponding method and algorithms.