With space technology development, the spatial robotic arm plays an increasingly important role in space activities. Spatial robotic arms can effectively replace humans to complete in-orbit service tasks. The trajectory planning is the basis of robotic arm motion. Its merit has an essential impact on the quality of the completed operation. The research on spatial robotic arm trajectory planning has not yet formed a broad framework categorization, so it is necessary to analyze and deeply summarize the existing research systematically. This paper introduces the current situation of space obstacle avoidance trajectory planning and motion trajectory planning. It discusses the basic principle and practical application of the spatial robotic arm trajectory planning method. The future development trend has also been prospected.

The end-effector is a key device for direct contact and operation between the operator and the workpiece, and its mechanical structure will directly affect the quality of the machine and expand its application. The theoretical research and technical implementation of the end-effector for compliance control are facing a lot of urgent challenges to be solved, therefore, the research results of active compliance control of robot end-effectors have a very broad application prospect. This paper describes the design and research results of different end-effectors under impedance-based control, hybrid force/position control, and intelligent flexible control methods, respectively. Under each control method, the structural characteristics and the optimized control scheme under different drives are introduced. Finally, key techniques for achieving compliance control are derived by summarizing, which broadens the engineering applications and provides methods and ideas for future research.

The modular robot is becoming a prevalent research object in robots because of its unique configuration advantages and performance characteristics. It is possible to form robot configurations with different functions by reconfiguring functional modules. This paper focuses on studying the modular robot’s configuration design and self-reconfiguration process and hopes to realize the industrial application of the modular self-reconfiguration robot to a certain extent. We design robotic configurations with different DOF based on the cellular module of the hexahedron and perform the kinematic analysis of the structure. An innovative design of a modular reconfiguration platform for conformational reorganization is presented, and the collaborative path planning between different modules in the reconfiguration platform is investigated. We propose an optimized ant colony algorithm for reconfiguration path planning and verify the superiority and rationality of this algorithm compared with the traditional ant colony algorithm for platform path planning through simulation experiments.