Practical approaches to handle the singularities of a wrist-partitioned space manipulator

Space robotic systems are expected to play an increasingly important role in the future. However, the control methods based on the inverse kinematics are affected by singularities. In this paper, practical approaches are proposed to solve the problems of a wrist-partitioned space manipulator. For spacecraft-referenced end-point motion control, we presented the singularity separation plus damped reciprocal (SSPDR) method, which separates the singularity parameters from the inverse of the Jacobian, and replaces their reciprocals using the damped reciprocals. For another control strategy, i.e. inertially referenced end-point motion control, including spacecraft attitude-controlled mode and free-floating mode, the linear momentum equation is used to eliminate three independent variables. With modifying some expressions, the SSPDR method is utilized to solve the singularities of spacecraft attitude-controlled space robot. When the space robot is free-floating, the singularities, i.e. the so-called dynamic singularities, cannot be predicted according to its kinematic structure. Combining with the measured angular velocity of the base, the dynamic singularity handling problem is transformed into real-time kinematic singularity avoiding problem, which can be solved by the SSPDR method. Since the SVD decomposition, the estimation of the minimum singularity value, and the calculation of the generalized Jacobian matrix are not required, the algorithm has lower computation load. Another advantage is that, only the accuracy of part velocity components is reduced by adding the damped coefficients. Simulation results verify the proposed approaches.