On the adaptive control of space robots

It is shown that, for a variety of reasons, conventional adaptive control schemes cannot be generally applied to the control of space robots. Therefore, a robust adaptive control scheme that can be successfully applied to the control of space robots in various applications is presented. By using a special Lagrangian formalism, a globally valid dynamic model of space robots is derived and its dynamic properties which are useful for adaptive controller design are investigated. A unified framework is then presented to formulate the various applications, based on which the robust adaptive control scheme is derived. Since the framework is general, the proposed scheme can be actually applied to wider applications. To demonstrate the proposed scheme, the design process is applied to typical applications such as joint space control and Cartesian space control of space robots