Angular Momentum Control of Tumbling Spacecraft by Repetitive Impulses

Abstract

We discuss an angular momentum control of a tumbling spacecraft. The proposed control method is to apply an impulse by a space robot arm, to measure and control the relative position and attitude between the target spacecraft, and then to apply another impulse until the rotational motion of the target spacecraft is well damped. A discrete controller is designed using the simplified equations of rotational motion through appropriate coordinate transformation. Because the output control torque depends on the contact dynamics, the effects of the contact model uncertainty including gain uncertainty and direction uncertainty on the behavior of the closed loop system is focused. The stationary response under contact model uncertainty is investigated in detail using the properties of the roots of polynomials and stability condition is analytically derived. Numerical simulations are given to validate the proposed approach.