Utilization of Holonomic Distribution Control for Reactionless Path Planning

This article introduces a new technique for planning reactionless paths to a point in Cartesian space, for manipulators mounted on a free-floating satellite. It is based on decomposition of the manipulator joint space into sets referred to as primitives which have redundancy one with respect to the attitude motion of the base body. The time duration of the manipulator motion is divided into sub-intervals. During a given sub-interval only one primitive is used. The choice of feasible sequence of primitives and times for their actuation, that satisfies given path constraints is made using mixed-variables optimization solver based on a mesh adaptive direct search algorithm