Path-planning for elastically-mounted space manipulators: experimental evaluation of the Coupling Map

The Coupling Map has been proposed as an analytical tool to describe the dynamic interaction between space manipulators which are either elastically mounted or carried by free-flying spacecraft. The Coupling Map has yielded a number of path-planning algorithms which have been successfully demonstrated in simulation to improve system performance. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the Coupling Map and some of its path-planning algorithms. These experimental results show that the Coupling Map based path-planning algorithms are valid and viable candidates for practical implementation on space manipulator systems