Hierarchical path planning for multi-arm spacecraft with general translational and rotational locomotion mode

On-orbit construction and maintenance technology will play a significant role in future space exploration. The dexterous multifunctional spacecraft equipped with multi-arm, for instance, SpiderFab Bot, has attracted a great deal of focus due to its versatility in completing these missions. In such engineering practice, point-to-point moving in a complex environment is the fundamental issue. This paper investigates the three-dimensional point-to-point path planning problem, and a hierarchical path planning architecture is developed to give the trajectory of the multi-arm spacecraft effectively and efficiently. In the proposed 3-level architecture, the high-level planner generates the global constrained centric trajectory of the spacecraft with a rigid envelop assumption; the middle-level planner contributes the action sequence, a combination of the newly developed general translational and rotational locomotion mode, to cope with the relative position and attitude of the arms about the centroid of the spacecraft; the low-level planner maps the position/attitude of the end-effector of each arm from the operational space to the joint space optimally. Finally, the simulation experiment is carried out, and the results verify the effectiveness of the proposed three-layer architecture path planning strategy.