INERTIAL PARAMETER IDENTIFICATION OF A CAPTURED PAYLOAD ATTACHED TO A ROBOTIC MANIPULATOR ON A FREE-FLYING SPACECRAFT

The groundwork for the dynamics of a free-flyer with a manipulator has been laid out by
Yoshida, Vafa and Dubowsky, and Papadopoulos and Moosovian with the Generalized Jacobian
Matrix, Virtual Manipulator, and Barycentric Vector Approach respectively. The identification
of parameters for a robot manipulator has also been approached for industrial robots as well as
through adaptive control theory. What is proposed is a method for inertial parameter identification
and verification for a spacecraft with an attached manipulator that is an extension of the
ground-fixed Inverse Direct Dynamic Model to function for a free-flying spacecraft. This method
for inertial parameter identification for a spacecraft-manipulator system with an attached client
spacecraft, debris, or other grappled payload is developed in this thesis and is experimentally
tested using results for a servicer and an “unknown” grappled payload using three separate test
beds. The results of the experiments show that the proposed method is capable of identifying the
inertial parameters of the servicer and the grappled payload.