Energy-efficient joint path-following for attitude-fixed space manipulators with bounds on completion time and motor voltage/current

Abstract

This paper investigates the minimum-energy joint path-following problem for space manipulators whose base attitude is stabilized by reaction wheels. In the problem, manipulator joint path is specified for rest-to-rest motion and constraints are imposed as the upper bound on both motion completion time and the voltage/current limits of DC motors in manipulator joints and reaction wheels. We suggest a simple two-stage algorithm to address this problem. The algorithm first tries to find a global optimal solution by solving a relaxed convex problem. If the convex relaxation is not successful, then the algorithm solves subproblems iteratively to find a suboptimal solution. Since both problems are formulated as second-order cone programming (SOCP) form, they can be solved efficiently using dedicated SOCP solvers. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by numerical experiments.