TRACKING CONTROL OF A SPACE VEHICLE WITH DUAL-ARM ROBOTIC MANIPULATOR USING SLIDING MODE CONTROL

The use of free-flying space manipulators for the capture of noncooperative targets in space is of great interest, but controlling the spacecraft bus and manipulator at the same time can prove to be a challenging task due to the coupling dynamics. In this paper, the dynamics of a rigid body-space vehicle with two robotic manipulators is studied. A sliding mode control is proposed to account for the coupling of the base spacecraft and the manipulators, and a variational integrator is used in dynamic propagation to ensure that the geometric properties of the system are preserved. The asymptotic stability of the control law is proven through the Lyapunov direct method. Numerical simulations show that the manipulator successfully approaches the designated contact points on the target surface under the designated control action.