In recent years, there has been a growing concern regarding the increase in space debris, such as the upper stages of satellites and rockets that have reached the end of their operational lives and an interest in removing this debris. It was considered that a robot for removing such space debris would require a robotic satellite with redundant manipulators that can operate in space, where it cannot be repaired for long periods of time, and can autonomously adapt to its failures and maintain its functionality. The conventional control of redundant manipulators generally uses the pseudo-inverse of the long Jacobi matrix. However, as the number of degrees of freedom increases, these are not utilized effectively, and the number of operations and operation time increase. Therefore, in this study, we propose a control method that utilizes the relaxation process in a viscoelastic manipulator model to calculate the shape of hyper-redundant manipulators. The control method calculates the shapes of the hyper-redundant manipulator in a decentralized manner using significantly few calculation resources and autonomously adapts to partial faults without identifying these.
Saito et al. (Fri,) studied this question.