Space robotics poses unique challenges arising from the limitation of energy and computational resources, and the complexity of the environment and employed platforms. At the control center, offline motion planning is fundamental in the computation of optimized trajectories accounting for the system's constraints. Smooth movements, collision and forbidden areas avoidance, target visibility and energy consumption are all important factors to consider to be able to generate feasible and optimal plans. When mobile manipulators (terrestrial, aerial) are employed, the base and the arm movements are often separately planned, ultimately resulting in sub-optimal solutions. We propose an Optimal Whole Body Planner (OptiWB) based on Discrete Dynamic Programming (DDP) and optimal interpolation. Kinematic redundancy is exploited for collision and forbidden areas avoidance, and to improve target illumination and visibility from onboard cameras. The planner, implemented in ROS (Robot Operating System), interfaces 3DROCS, a mission planner used in several programs of the European Space Agency (ESA) to support planetary exploration surface missions and part of the ExoMars Rover's planning software. The proposed approach is exercised on a simplified version of the Analog-1 Interact rover by ESA, a 7-DOFs robotic arm mounted on a four wheels non-holonomic platform.

翻译：空间机器人学面临独特挑战，这些挑战源于能源与计算资源的限制，以及环境与所用平台的复杂性。在控制中心，离线运动规划是计算满足系统约束的优化轨迹的基础。平滑运动、碰撞与禁入区域规避、目标可见性以及能耗都是生成可行且最优方案需考虑的重要因素。当使用移动机械臂（地面、空中）时，底座与机械臂的运动常被分开规划，最终导致次优解。我们提出一种基于离散动态规划与最优插值的最优全身规划器。该规划器利用运动学冗余性来规避碰撞与禁入区域，并改善来自机载摄像头的目标照明与可见性。该规划器在ROS中实现，并与3DROCS（一种用于支持行星探索表面任务的ESA多个项目中的任务规划器，也是ExoMars火星车规划软件的一部分）进行接口。所提方法在ESA的Analog-1 Interact火星车简化版本上进行了验证，该车是一个安装在四轮非完整平台上的7自由度机械臂。