A NOVEL ADAPTIVE CAPTURE DEVICE AND CONTROL METHOD FOR SPACE DEBRIS

At present, typical contact Active Debris Removal (ADR) methods for space debris focus on the capture of specific structures, piercing into debris or the overall envelope, with certain stability and flexibility. However, these methods only would be valid for specific structures and debris with required shapes and sizes, or cannot achieve repeatable capture. In this paper, an adaptive capture device and the control method is proposed to full fill the ability to repeat capture the common structures such as the edges, point edges or surface of space debris with different shapes and sizes. Firstly, the key idea of the device is to construct an adaptive capture volume by elastic claw. Different capture strategies for targets with different size are proposed based on the device. Secondly, for the process of boundary capture of points/edges, this paper considering the friction in the contact process, we introduce the Lugre model to correct it. This enables a more accurate modeling of the dynamics of the capture system. Finally, analyzes the possible influence of different contact points on the capture task. Different contact points have different effects on attitude stability during the capture and the consumption of detumbling control after capture. The results show that the capture device can realize the repeated capture of debris with different size (0cm to 250cm) and different shapes, which reducing the capture accuracy requirements to ten centimeters. Further ground tests are wished to show that the proposed adaptive capture device and manipulator method are technically feasible and have great potential for future space debris ADR.