Redundant-Motion Coordination and Base Disturbance Suppression of a 6R1P Free-Floating Space Manipulator Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Free-floating space manipulators are strongly coupled systems in which manipulator motion affects spacecraft base motion through momentum exchange, making simultaneous end-effector control and disturbance suppression challenging. This work investigates how an additional actuated prismatic degree of freedom influences whole-arm coordination in a 6R1P free-floating space manipulator. Compared with a fixed-length 6R configuration, the prismatic joint enlarges the feasible motion space and introduces an additional motion-allocation direction for full-pose tasks under generalized-Jacobian constraints. A proximal policy optimization (PPO)-based controller is developed for full-pose reaching with spacecraft-motion-aware objectives. Simulation results show that the 6R1P configuration improves reaching performance and reduces spacecraft reaction compared with the locked-prismatic 6R baseline. Trajectory-level dynamic reconstruction further reveals that the disturbance reduction is not caused by direct cancellation from the prismatic joint itself, but mainly by configuration-dependent redistribution of revolute-joint motions and enhanced mutual cancellation among their reaction contributions. These results demonstrate that telescopic redundancy provides a mechanism for coordinated motion allocation in free-floating manipulation, enabling learned policies to exploit additional degrees of freedom for improved task execution and reduced spacecraft disturbance.