The Distributed Control System Of a Light Space Manipulator

To build a space station, a manipulator is indispensable, especially a light space manipulator with high stiffness is necessary for spacecrafts. In this paper, a distributed control system is presented to such a manipulator for the purpose of reliability, compactness and light weight. A main controller is located inside the spacecraft and six joint controllers are placed inside the joints. All the controllers communicate with each other through RS422 serial data bus, and the manipulator is controlled via the main controller. The effectiveness of this distributed control system is partly confirmed by the ground experiments.