Arm path planning of a space robot with angular momentum is considered
in this paper. A space robot changes its attitude by the arm motion a
nd angular momentum of the space robot has the possibility to reduce t
he attitude change. A path planning method of the arm where the final
satellite attitude becomes the same as the initial one is proposed. Th
e method derives an approximate path first based on the attitude chang
e when the arm moves along an infinitely small closed curve and then m
odifies the path by the Newton method. The amplitude of the arm motion
decreases with the magnitude of the angular momentum, which shows tha
t the proposed method utilizes the angular momentum effectively.