Dynamics & Control of Multi - arm Space Robots During Chase & Capture Operations

This paper studies the motion control of a multi-arm freeflying space robot chasing a passive object in close proximity. Free-flyer kinematics are developed using a minimum set of body-fixed barycentric vectors. Using a general and a quasi-coordinate Lagrangian formulation, two dynamics models are derived. Control algorithms are developed that allow coordinated tracking control of the manipulators and the spacecraft. The performance of modelbased algorithms is compared, by simulation, to that of a transposed Jacobian algorithm. Results show that the latter can give reasonably good performance with reduced computational burden.