Abstract A significant number of the planned on-orbit servicing and active debris removal missions will be performed by a spacecraft equipped with a robotic arm. In this paper we propose a new method for the path planning of the robotic arm mounted on the free-floating unmanned spacecraft. In the proposed approach the path of the arm is described in the joint space by a spline function. The coordinates of spline knots form the vector of decision variables. The constrained nonlinear optimization problem is formulated and solved with an active-set algorithm. The proposed method generates a collision-free path of the arm that results in the desired position and orientation of the gripper and the desired attitude of the spacecraft. The possibility of achieving all these goals at the same time is the major advantage of the proposed approach. The practical applicability of the presented method is demonstrated in experiments performed on the planar air-bearing microgravity simulator (for a planar case) and using numerical simulations performed with the Monte Carlo method (for a spatial case). In the planar case the optimal path is compared with the path obtained using the bi-directional Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) algorithm. It is shown that the path obtained using the proposed method is shorter and smoother than the RRT path.

Highlights • A new method for path planning of a robotic arm mounted on a spacecraft is proposed. • The desired configuration of the gripper and attitude of the spacecraft is obtained. • The practical applicability is demonstrated in simulations and in experiments. • Experiments are performed on a planar air-bearing microgravity simulator. • The proposed approach is compared with the bi-directional RRT algorithm.