Autonomous Planning of Discontinuous Terrain-Dependent Crawling for Space Dobby Robots

Complex space missions require more space robotic extravehicular operations required to crawl on spacecraft surfaces with discontinuous features at the graspable point, greatly increasing the difficulty of space robot motion manipulation. Therefore, this paper proposes an autonomous planning method for space dobby robots based on dynamic potential fields. This method can realize the autonomous crawling of space dobby robots in discontinuous environments while considering the task objectives and the self-collision problem of robotic arms when crawling. In this method, a hybrid event–time trigger with event triggering as the main trigger is proposed by combining the working characteristics of space dobby robots and improving the gait timing trigger; the dynamic potential field function is designed to adjust the space robot robotic arm grasping point adaptively according to the space robot state. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed autonomous planning method.