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Published October 2008 | Published
Journal Article Open

Propellant-Free Control of Tethered Formation Flight, Part 2: Nonlinear Underactuated Control

Abstract

This is the second in a series of papers that exploit the physical coupling of tethered spacecraft to derive a propellant-free spin-up and attitude control strategy. We take a nonlinear control approach to underactuated tethered formation flying spacecraft, whose lack of full state feedback linearizability, along with their complex nonholonomic behavior, characterizes the difficult nonlinear control problem. We introduce several nonlinear control laws that are more efficient in tracking time-varying trajectories than linear control. We also extend our decentralized control approach to underactuated tethered systems, thereby eliminating the need for any intersatellite communication. To our knowledge, this work reports the first nonlinear control results for underactuated tethered formation flying spacecraft. This article further illustrates the potential of the proposed strategy by providing a new momentum dumping method that does not use torque-generating thrusters.

Additional Information

© 2008 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. Received 16 May 2007; revision received 10 May 2008; accepted for publication 10 May 2008. Presented as Paper 6858 at the AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference and Exhibit, at the Marriott Hilton Head Beach and Golf Resort in Hilton Head, SC, 20–23 August 2007. The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Contract Monitor, David Leisawitz) for both financial and technical support for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology–Space Systems Laboratory and Payload Systems SPHERES Tether program. The authors also thank the associate editor (Jesse Leitner) and the anonymous reviewer for their constructive feedback.

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 24, 2023