Control of a manipulator for replacing the orbit replacement unit on the space station

Replacing of orbital replacement units by a manipulator has important significances in economic and safety aspects on space station. In this paper, the replacement task flow is analyzed in detail, and the manipulator's different working modes in the task are divided. Refer to different working modes, open loop path planning algorithm, vision-based close loop path planning algorithm and impedance control algorithm are researched, and a distributed control architecture is proposed for the task. Based on a manipulator prototype with 6 degrees of freedom, replacement experiments are done and results show that the control method in this paper is reasonable.