Path planning for space manipulators to minimize spacecraft attitude disturbances

A technique, called the enhanced disturbance map, for planning space manipulator motions that will result in relatively low spacecraft disturbance is presented. Although a spacecraft´s attitude control reaction jet can compensate for the dynamic disturbances imposed on the spacecraft by the manipulator´s motions, reaction jet fuel is a limited resource. Excessive disturbances would limit the life of a system. The enhanced disturbance map can aid in understanding this complex problem and in the development of algorithms to reduce disturbances, including ones that use manipulator redundancy to eliminate the disturbances