TY - JOUR
T1 - Contactless attitude control of an uncooperative satellite by laser ablation
AU - Sakai, Daisuke
AU - Yoshimura, Yasuhiro
AU - Hanada, Toshiya
AU - Itaya, Yuki
AU - Fukushima, Tadanori
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IAA
PY - 2022/7
Y1 - 2022/7
N2 - An active debris removal method using a laser is a promising technology for its advantage in contactless operations. This paper deals with the attitude control of an uncooperative target by a laser, which is an important phase before deorbiting. The difficulty of attitude control by the laser stems from the torque directional constraint because the laser generates thrust along the normal vector of the irradiated face irrespective of the irradiating direction. Thus, the control torque along the normal vector cannot be generated, which makes the attitude control with the laser torque challenging. To tackle this problem, this paper first designs a reference controller that assumes arbitrary control torques are available. Then, a method for determining the irradiating point is proposed so that the difference between the reference torque and the actual one is minimized. Although the proposed controller does not guarantee theoretical convergence to the desired attitude, the effectiveness of the proposed controller is numerically verified for a box-type object. Furthermore, the robustness to the uncertainties of thrust magnitude and direction is also examined by Monte Carlo simulations.
AB - An active debris removal method using a laser is a promising technology for its advantage in contactless operations. This paper deals with the attitude control of an uncooperative target by a laser, which is an important phase before deorbiting. The difficulty of attitude control by the laser stems from the torque directional constraint because the laser generates thrust along the normal vector of the irradiated face irrespective of the irradiating direction. Thus, the control torque along the normal vector cannot be generated, which makes the attitude control with the laser torque challenging. To tackle this problem, this paper first designs a reference controller that assumes arbitrary control torques are available. Then, a method for determining the irradiating point is proposed so that the difference between the reference torque and the actual one is minimized. Although the proposed controller does not guarantee theoretical convergence to the desired attitude, the effectiveness of the proposed controller is numerically verified for a box-type object. Furthermore, the robustness to the uncertainties of thrust magnitude and direction is also examined by Monte Carlo simulations.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.actaastro.2022.04.024
DO - 10.1016/j.actaastro.2022.04.024
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85129734101
SN - 0094-5765
VL - 196
SP - 275
EP - 281
JO - Acta Astronautica
JF - Acta Astronautica
ER -