Modeling and Simulation of Astronaut Motions during Extravehicular Activity: A Complex System Based Method

Special analysis of astronauts’ motions must be carried out before extravehicular activities in order to design the missions and build the guideline for astronauts training. A method of modeling and simulation of astronauts’ motions during extravehicular activities is developed under the complex system theory. The astronaut in space suit with the backpack is described with a complex system model. Then a coupled forward-inverse dynamics model is present to calculate the motions of every subsystem and the whole system dynamically without introducing additional variables for multi results problem; and a sensor-actor model is built for analyzing the torque on the joints generated by the space suit which expands the analytical space from two dimensions to three dimensions. Finally, in order to show the effectiveness and feasibility of the method, application examples of the constrained operations are presented.