Propellant-Free Control of Tethered Formation Flight, Part 1: Linear Control and Experimentation
- Creators
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Chung, Soon-Jo
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Miller, David W.
Abstract
We introduce a decentralized attitude control strategy that can dramatically reduce the usage of propellant, by taking full advantage of the physical coupling of the tether. Motivated by a controllability analysis, indicating that both array resizing and spin-up are fully controllable by the reaction wheels and the tether motor, we report the first propellant-free underactuated control results for tethered formation flying spacecraft. This paper also describes the hardware development and experimental validation of the proposed method using the Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, and Reorient Experimental Satellites test bed. In particular, a new relative sensing mechanism that uses sixderee-of-freedom force-torque sensors and rate gyroscopes is introduced and validated in the closed-loop control experiments.
Additional Information
© 2008 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. Presented as Paper 6858 at the AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference and Exhibit (GN&C), at the Marriott Hilton Head Beach and Golf Resort in Hilton Head, SC, 20–23 August 2007; received 16 May 2007; revision received 23 September 2007; accepted for publication 5 October 2007. The authors 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 Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, and Reorient Experimental Satellites Tether program. The authors would like to thank the associate editor (Jesse Leitner) and the anonymous reviewers for their truly constructive feedback. The authors also thank Danielle Adams, Alvar Saenz-Otero, John Merk, Edmund Kong, and Christophe Mandy for the technical discussions and support. The hardware described in this paper has been developed in collaboration with Payload Systems, Inc.Attached Files
Published - GCD_underactuated_part1.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 73053
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20161221-082116459
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
- Created
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2016-12-21Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-11Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- GALCIT