Assembly and Nonlinear H Infinitye Control of Free-Floating Base Space Manipulators.

Author(s)

Tatiana de Figueiredo Pereira Alves Taveira Pazelli

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Carlos.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Escola de Engenharia de São Carlos (EESC/SBD)
• Defense date: 2012-01-13

Examining board members

Marco Henrique Terra; Jose Jaime da Cruz; Adriano Almeida Gonçalves Siqueira; Luiz Carlos Gadelha de Souza; Eduardo Aoun Tannuri

• Advisor: Marco Henrique Terra

Abstract

Space manipulators robots will be applied, in a near future, in rescue services and maintenance of spacecraft and satellites in orbit. The study and development of controllers for this type of system is crucial to ensure that those applications become reality. At this thesis, an experimental platform is built to enable behavioral assessment of this type of system. Based on a floating module by air bearings, it is composed by a free base, links connected by joints and end-effectors. Two possibilities of fluctuation were set to make the structure more versatile. The first uses an air chamber in the support desk and the second uses air chambers at the base and in each joint of the robot. Its modular mechanical structure allows a variety of configurations, with one or two arms which may be composed of flexible or rigid links. The entire command electronics and the power of the robots components are allocated in its floating base, basing the system communication with the remote computer in a wireless communication standard. The control software, developed in Matlab and residing on the remote computer, presents a friendly and intuitive interface, enabling the use of both the UARM and the free-floating base robot for simulated and experimental testing of control systems. The main characteristic of space manipulators is the dynamic coupling between the base and the robotic arm. In order to avoid the complications involved in kinematic mapping of these systems, the problem of trajectory tracking is formulated directly in task space. So the positions of the manipulator end-effector are directly controlled. The dynamic equation of the free-floating manipulator is described from the concept of Dynamically Equivalent Manipulator. A solution of adaptive robust control is proposed, based on H¥ criterion to deal with the problem of trajectory tracking subject to uncertainties in the model and external disturbances. The adaptability of neural networks is combined with robustness defined by a nonlinear H Infinite controller composing different techniques developed in accordance with the knowledge and the availability of the robots model to the controller. The analysis of results of simulation and experiments performed in UARM showed the applicability of the methods, as well as its capacity for robustness. Graphs have illustrated the trajectory tracking procedure conducted by the end-effector of the space manipulator identifying the action of control laws proposed. A numerical comparison between the strategies was provided by performance indices related to energy consumption and the tracking error (AU)