Control of a manipulator for replacing the orbit replacement unit on the space station

Replacing of orbital replacement units by a manipulator has important significances in economic and safety aspects on space station. In this paper, the replacement task flow is analyzed in detail, and the manipulator´s different working modes in the task are divided. Refer to different working modes, open loop path planning algorithm, vision-based close loop path planning algorithm and impedance control algorithm are researched, and a distributed control architecture is proposed for the task. Based on a manipulator prototype with 6 degrees of freedom, replacement experiments are done and results show that the control method in this paper is reasonable.