Abstract: In this paper, we have proposed an adaptive control scheme for the capture of a tumbling spacecraft using free-floating space manipulators. Capturing tumbling target spacecraft requires the free-floating space manipulator to have high tracking performance. However, uncertainties always exist in both the free-floating space manipulator and the target spacecraft. In the presence of parameter uncertainties, model based controllers tend to give deteriorated performance or even become unstable. Thus, we employ parameter adaptations to improve the performance of model based controllers, and we have also proposed a novel joint-space adaptive controller for free-floating space manipulators. Simulation results are presented to show the performance of the proposed adaptive control scheme.

Key words: adaptive control, uncertainties, tumbling spacecraft, free-floating manipulators