Kinematic and Dynamic Properties of an Elbow Manipulator Mounted on a Satellite

The discussion in this paper is intended as an introduction to several topics treated in various forms or extensions in the other papers in this issue. Many applications of robots in space require the robot to manipulate a load mass that is not negligible compared to the satellite on which the robot is mounted. In such cases, the robot motion disturbs the position and attitude of the satellite, and this in turn disturbs the robot end-effector position. This implies that the robot joint angles that would normally be commanded to produce a prescribed robot end-effector position and orientation will result in missing the target. In this paper an overview is given of certain engineering problems arising from this phenomenon. The robot end-effector positioning problem is discussed for the two cases of the satellite attitude control system either off or on, and computation of the robot motion disturbances to the satellite is discussed. Shuttle Remote Manipulator System based examples are given.