Hierarchical path planning for multi-arm spacecraft with general translational and rotational locomotion mode

On-orbit construction and maintenance technology will play a significant role in future space exploration.The dexterous multifunctional spacecraft equipped with multi-arm,for instance,Spider Fab Bot,has attracted a great deal of focus due to its versatility in completing these missions.In such engineering practice,point-to-point moving in a complex environment is the fundamental issue.This paper investigates the three-dimensional point-to-point path planning problem,and a hierarchical path planning architecture is developed to give the trajectory of the multi-arm spacecraft effectively and efficiently.In the proposed 3-level architecture,the high-level planner generates the global constrained centric trajectory of the spacecraft with a rigid envelop assumption;the middle-level planner contributes the action sequence,a combination of the newly developed general translational and rotational locomotion mode,to cope with the relative position and attitude of the arms about the centroid of the spacecraft;the low-level planner maps the position/attitude of the end-effector of each arm from the operational space to the joint space optimally.Finally,the simulation experiment is carried out,and the results verify the effectiveness of the proposed three-layer architecture path planning strategy.