A Novel Space Robot with Triple Cable-Driven Continuum Arms for Space Grasping

With the increasing demand of human beings for space exploration, space robots show great development potential. When grasping space objects with different sizes and shapes, cable-driven continuum arms have better performance than traditional robots. In this paper, a novel space robot with triple cable-driven continuum arms is proposed, which can achieve compliant grasping through multi-arm cooperation. The kinematic model of the robot is proposed and verified through simulations and experiments. Results show that the maximum repeat positioning error is no larger than 1 mm and the maximum tracking error is no larger than 2 mm, compared to the 300 mm long arm. In addition, the demonstration experiment of grasping a ball indicates the good performance of the robot in compliant grasping.