Abstract: Aiming at the problems of excessive contact force and difficulty in compensating different axis errors during rigid dock-ing of non-cooperative targets in space, a 3R-1T Omnidirectional compliant docking joint is developed, which can not only generate passive flexible motion to compensate errors of distance or angle, but also buffer and unload six-dimensional contact force in space. At the same time, it can realize rigid-flexible dual-mode conversion operation by means of locking mechanism. The flexible dynamic model of spacecraft complex with compliant docking joint is estab-lished by using Lagrange’s equation containing dissipation function. A contact force simulation model is established, which verifies the mechanism of omnidirectional compliance and damping stabilization. Furthermore, two non-cooperative target docking models, rigid and flexible, are built. The simulation experiments under 24 typical combined errors of distance and angle shows that the success rate of compliant docking is nearly 5 times that of rigid docking, and the peak value of contact force decreases up to 89.5%. Therefore, the rationality and effectiveness of 3R-1T omnidirec-tional compliant docking joint applied to space compliant docking task are verified.

Key words: non-cooperative target, 3R-1T, omnidirectional compliance, buffering and unloading, dual-mode of soft and rigid