A Detumbling Strategy for an Orbital Manipulator in the Post-Grasp Phase

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a detumbling strategy that stabilizes the motion of a tumbling client satellite using an orbital servicing manipulator, which is the goal of the post-grasp phase. One of the critical aspects in this phase is ensuring that excessive contact forces are not generated at the grasp interface. In addition, space mission requirements might demand a nominal manipulator configuration that is suitable for further manipulation/servicing activities. The proposed strategy allows the detumbling of the client motion while ensuring that the contact forces developed at the grasp interface do not violate a safety threshold. Further, it allows the reconfiguration of the manipulator arm by exploiting the full actuation capability of the manipulator-equipped servicing spacecraft. The controller guarantees joint task convergence in the nullspace of the manipulator's end-effector, and is also valid for kinematically singular configurations of the manipulator. It is further augmented using a quadratic programming based approach to optimally constrain the contact forces. Finally, simulation results for a post-grasp detumbling scenario are shown to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.