Space Robot Path Planning for Collision Avoidance.

This paper deals with a path planning of space robot which includes a collision avoidance algorithm. For the future space robot operation, autonomous and self-contained path planning is mandatory to capture a target without the aid of ground station. Especially the collision avoidance with target itself must be always considered. Once the location, shape and grasp point of the target are identified, those will be expressed in the configuration space. And in this paper a potential method, Laplace potential function, is applied to obtain the path in the configuration space in order to avoid so-called deadlock phenomenon. Some improvement on the generation of the path has been observed by applying path smoothing method, which utilizes the spline function interpolation. This reduces the computational load and generates the smooth path of the space robot. The validity of this approach is shown by a few numerical simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]