Rotational Dynamics and Capture Strategy for Space Tumbling Targets

Active Debris Removal is an urgent topic in space environment maintenance. Capturing the defunct satellite with a space robot is one of the most important methods. However, targets in space have complex tumbling motion, making it difficult to estimate their motions and rendezvous to build a stiff connection. In this paper, we first construct the dynamics model of free-torque tumbling targets and analyze the change rules of parameters in different tumbling motions. Afterwards, we propose a capture strategy aiming at the mission of debris removal by grasping the communication antennas of the satellite. First, the point with the lowest speed is selected, and the approaching pose of the robot end-effector is computed by principal component analysis (PCA). In order to maximize the dexterity of the robotic arm during approaching phase, we transform it into an optimization problem and improve the simulated annealing algorithm with a greedy neighbor generator to solve it.