Guidance and Control of "Tethered Retriever" with Collaborative Tension-Thruster Control for Future On-Orbit Service Missions

Abstract

“Tethered Retriever, ” a robotic system for retrieving failed satellites or assembling parts, is proposed as one of the future on-orbit service missions in this paper. This Tethered Retriever (TR) is a small space robot tethered to the “Service Satellite, ” which can repair failed satellites or supply expendables to the satellite to be served. After the TR is released from the Service Satellite, it flies to the target object, captures it, and comes back to the Service Satellite. We discuss the collaborative control of tension (con-trolled by the Service Satellite) and thruster (controlled by the TR), mainly in the approach phase to the target. We performed numerical simulations as well as experi-ments using air-bearing test bed. Through those results, we verified the stability and the robustness of the pro-posed guidance and control algorithm, tolerating various kinds of system errors.