Translational and tumbling gaits for trinal-branch robots

With the continuous development of aerospace industry, space robots have been widely used in challenging environments. Due to the special space environment of space missions, the widely used ordinary manipulators were considered unsuitable for space on-orbit tasks. In order to solve this problem, this paper presents a novel class of robots adapted to finish the complex tasks on the truss of the space station, which we call “trinal-branch robot”. This kind of robots consist of three branches and have 15 degrees of freedoms (DOFs). In this paper, the gaits fall into two categories: translational and tumbling. The simulation results confirm that this kind of robots are flexible enough to perform motion on trusses of different sizes.