Adaptive Robot Detumbling of a Non-Rigid Satellite

TL;DR

This paper presents an adaptive detumbling method for non-rigid, uncertain-dynamics satellites modeled as two-link chains, enabling effective stabilization using space tugs despite unknown physical parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adaptive control approach for detumbling non-rigid satellites modeled as two-link chains with unknown parameters, advancing beyond rigid body assumptions.

Findings

Effective detumbling achieved despite unknown satellite parameters

Adaptive method handles both translational and rotational uncertainties

Framework applicable to flexible, non-rigid satellite stabilization

Abstract

The challenge of satellite stabilization, particularly those with uncertain flexible dynamics, has become a pressing concern in control and robotics. These uncertainties, especially the dynamics of a third-party client satellite, significantly complicate the stabilization task. This paper introduces a novel adaptive detumbling method to handle non-rigid satellites with unknown motion dynamics (translation and rotation). The distinctive feature of our approach is that we model the non-rigid tumbling satellite as a two-link serial chain with unknown stiffness and damping in contrast to previous detumbling research works which consider the satellite a rigid body. We develop a novel adaptive robotics approach to detumble the satellite by using two space tugs as servicer despite the uncertain dynamics in the post-capture case. Notably, the stiffness properties and other physical parameters, including the mass and inertia of the two links, remain unknown to the servicer. Our proposed method addresses the challenges in detumbling tasks and paves the way for advanced manipulation of non-rigid satellites with uncertain dynamics.