Research on 3D information collection path planning for hyper-redundant space robots (HSRs)

Abstract. This paper proposes a path-planning method for 3D information collection on the space station surface via the hyper-redundant space robot (HSR). Firstly, to efficiently acquire information on the space station surface, the space station is reduced to a cylindrical model for modelling, and the initial mapping of the temperature field is carried out by a popular Gaussian process. Based on the active information collection method, the collision-free viewpoint trajectory of the space station surface can be planned to improve the efficiency of surface information collection. Then, the path planning of the space station surface information collection can be realized by importing the space station model and temperature field data and performing weight initialization, stochastic search, and continuous optimization. Finally, simulation experiments show that the root-mean-square errors in the surface information collection process are lower than 1 mm relative to the true value. It proves the effectiveness of the online information collection path-planning (IP) method.