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Reactionless visual servoing of a multi-arm space robot combined with other manipulation tasks
Abdul Hafez A., Mithun P., Anurag V., Shah S., Krishna K. Robotics and Autonomous Systems91 1-10,2017.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Jul 12 2017

Visual servoing is an effective control method for autonomous manipulators, allowing them to reach a target using visual feedback. Mobile manipulation addresses the problem of controlling arms mounted on mobile bases, where visual servoing is still useful but not sufficient. In space robotics in particular, the unwanted forces exerted by the manipulators on the bases should be minimized, ideally without requiring extra compensation activity from the base engines. The control method responsible for this minimization is called reactionless manipulation.

The authors of this paper develop a theoretical method to integrate the two control methods in the general case of multiple arms mounted on the same base. In practice, reactionless manipulation aims to compensate for satellite motions while visual servoing aims to reach the target.

The paper illustrates the formulation of Jacobian matrices for vision and for arm kinematics, and extends their classical formulation to account for multiple arms and inertia terms. The final controller is a two-task controller. The main task uses visual servoing to guide the arms, but also produces uncontrolled motions of the base; the second task exploits additional degrees of freedom to use reactionless manipulation. This secondary task minimizes a cost function using quadratic minimization. The controller is numerically tested in Matlab, in scenarios of different complexity, up to a number of 14 degrees of freedom; results show that the integrated controller is effective both in reducing the position error and in minimizing the unwanted base motions.

The paper only develops a control law and demonstrates its stability. However, to develop a real space robotics application, open problems remain, as indicated by the authors. For instance, this controller does not consider collision and singularity avoidance; moreover, it is not tested in practical conditions, where lighting and image processing can create additional problems.

This very technical paper is surely of interest to people working in control and optimization methods.

Reviewer:  G. Gini Review #: CR145414 (1710-0686)
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