Quasi-continuous high-order sliding mode based controller for tethered satellite with chemical propulsion

This work is focused on controller designing for a tethered satellite system(TSS). Firstly, the dynamic equations of tethered system in orbital maneuvering are established based on a dumbbell model. Furthermore, a tether tension control scheme of chattering-free is proposed based on quasi-continuous high-order sliding mode to track a desired in-plane angle and tether length with fixed propulsive coefficients. The bound of system states is analyzed afterwards. And then, considering that the in-plane motion and out-of-plane motion of tethered system during maneuvering are decoupled and tether tension can´t damp out the out-of-plane angle, the binormal component of propulsion is taken as the control variable and a feedback linearization based thrust controller is adopted. Finally, numerical simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm.