Trajectory planning of free floating space robot for minimizing spacecraft attitude disturbance

Considering the problem of spacecraft attitude disturbance due to the motion of manipulator, a trajectory planning scheme based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed for free floating space robot (FFSR) to minimize the disturbance. By analyzing the system angular momentum conservation equation, the objective function for minimizing the disturbance is presented. High order polynomial is used to approximate the trajectories of manipulator joints, and the coefficients of the polynomial are set as optimization parameters. To guarantee the trajectory planning algorithm convergence, the PSO algorithm with constriction factor is used to search the optimal trajectory. Simulation results show that the spacecraft attitude disturbance is effectively restrained with accomplishing the position and attitude adjusting mission, which verifies the validity of the proposed method.