Equivalent Capture Control of a Space Netting Interface

During on-orbit capture process of a large space manipulator,large tracking and positioning errors of the end effector exist due to the joints' flexibility and the distortion of long beams.As a result,it is difficult to realize a successful capture.To solve this problem,a kind of netting interface suitable for space capture application is introduced to improve the end effector's capture ability under large positioning errors.Moreover,in order to improve the capture ability,with non-zero relative velocity between the end effector and target,an equivalent capture strategy is put forward to avoid the complexity modeling the interface's correcting force on the grapple of the target during the capture process.The proposed strategy simplifies the complicated capture problem into position tracking of the target grapple's projection on the capture plane,thus successful capture can be achieved even when a relative escaping velocity exists between the end effector and the target. Experiments show that the proposed strategy can enlarge the tolerance range of the netting capture interface,which proves the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.