Crawling Robot Path Planning on the Surface of the CubeSat

Abstract

To prolong the service life of satellites, space crawling robots are used for in-orbit services such as inspection and repair. However, the complex structure of the satellite surface requires path planning. Most current path planning algorithms are only applicable to the planar and 3D unconstrained case, and cannot be applied to CubeSat surface with abrupt changes in normal vectors. In this paper, we design a cube unfolding method to reduce the cube surface path planning problem to a planar path planning problem. This is accomplished by obtaining obstacle point cloud data through laser radar and converting the point cloud data into a grid map using the Gmapping algorithm. And considering the limitation of arithmetic power for operations on satellites, this paper uses PSO to solve this planar path planning problem. The experimental results show that the method can be applied to the surface of the CubeSat.