Motion Planning and Tracking Control of Space Underactuated Manipulator via Intelligent Algorithm

This paper presents a motion planning and tracking control strategy via intelligent algorithm for the space Pendubot. Such system consists of two sub-systems with first active joint: the planar Pendubot and vertical Pendubot. Based on the structural characteristic of the above systems, the control objective is to move the endpoints of the two subsystems to the same target position simultaneously. First, we build a unified dynamical model for the space Pendubot. Then combined with the control objective of two sub-systems, we plan the feasible trajectory for active links. The feasible trajectory includes two parts: the active link is moved to the target states along the first-part trajectory; the second-part trajectory containing the parameters have the same states as the first-part trajectory, and the underactuated link is indirectly controlled by adjusting the parameters. Furthermore, we employ the differential evolution algorithm (DEA) to get the optimized trajectory parameters, so controlling all links to the target states simultaneously. In this way, the control objective of the space Pendubot is realized. Simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed stratagy.