Task space control for on-orbit space robotics using a new ROS-based framework

This paper proposes several task space control approaches for complex on-orbit high degrees of freedom robots. These approaches include redundancy resolution and take the non-linear dynamic model of the on-orbit robotic systems into account. The suitability of the proposed task space control approaches is explored in several on-orbit servicing operations requiring visual servoing tasks of complex humanoid robots. A unified open-source framework for space-robotics simulations, called OnOrbitROS, is used to evaluate the proposed control systems and compare their behaviour with state-of-the-art existing ones. The adopted framework is based on ROS and includes and reproduces the principal environmental conditions that eventual space robots and manipulators could experience in an on-orbit servicing scenario. The architecture of the different software modules developed and their application on complex space robotic systems is presented. Efficient real-time implementations are achieved using the proposed OnOrbitROS framework. The proposed controllers are applied to perform the guidance of a humanoid robot. The robot dynamics are integrated into the definition of the controllers and an analysis of the results and practical properties are described in the results section.