A novel exterior climbing robot design for space station

Abstract

This paper proposed a biologically inpired handrail climbing robot "MonkeyBot" that could provide inspection and maintenance for the space station. Space debris is the biggest hazards for space station from the outer space. When a threat from orbital derbis is idenfitied a bit late, the station will be potentially damaged by the debris. MonkeyBot is designed to meet this challenge, especially for some key components or areas on the space station. MonkeyBot is a redundancy robot with four limbs, which not only has multi climbing strategies and gaits to achieve a full coverage of the space module, but also it has dexterous capability for on-orbit servicing with each limb. This paper will focus on the geometry design, mathematical modeling, workspace and dexterity analysis and climbing strategies and climbing gaits evaluation. The analysis result shows that the maneuverability surpasses the state of art space station exterior robot.