Autonomous Trajectory Planning of Free-floating Robot for Capturing Space Target

Space target may move in various modes, such as free-floating, tumbling, and so on. In order to capture a space target, autonomous trajectory planning algorithm is studied. The base of the space robot is free-floating for the purpose of safety and saving the fuel. Firstly, the target feature is extracted based on the measured information via the hand-eye camera. Then the target pose (position and orientation) and velocity (linear velocity and angular velocity) relative to the end-effector are estimated using Kalman filtering technology. Thirdly, an autonomous trajectory planning approach is proposed for capturing an space target with unknown motion. Lastly, a semi-physical simulation system is established to verify the planning algorithm. The simulation results show that the algorithm is valid