Mission design of a tethered robot satellite “STARS” for orbital experiment

Abstract

The Space Tethered Autonomous Robotic Satellite (STARS) was developed in Kagawa University and launched by the H-IIA rocket by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on 23 January, 2009. The primary objective of STARS is technical verification of a tethered space robot, which is connected to a mother spacecraft through a tether, proposed in 1995. Main characteristics of STARS are: (i) it is mother-daughter satellite; (ii) it becomes a tethered system on orbit; (iii) the daughter satellite is a tethered space robot. STARS consists of two satellites connected by a tether. One is a mother satellite (a mother spacecraft), which deploys and retrieves a tether connected to the other satellite. The other is a daughter satellite (a tethered space robot). The mother satellite has a tether deployment system. During tether deployment, the attitude of the daughter satellite is controlled by its own arm link motion, and a camera mounted on the daughter satellite takes a photograph of the mother satellite. It is important to design launch lock for STARS, since it has many actuation parts and it is two satellites system. 978-1-4244-4602-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE

Detumbling a tethered space robot-target combination using optimal control

“…is the motion rate of the joints; 6 1 b u c R is the velocity dependent non-linear term for the TSR base; 1 c nu c R is the velocity dependent non-linear term for the manipulator arm; …”

“…Nohmi [4][5][6] investigated the arm link to control the TSR's attitude during the deployment phase, and a microgravity experiment was conducted to validate the feasibility of this scheme. Godard [7] designed a nonlinear optimal controller using an inverse optimal technique to control the attitude of a satellite via tether offset variations.…”

Modeling and position control of tethered octocopters

“…The first references to consider the tethered configuration are found in [7] and [4]. Some applications of this kind configuration are found in aerostats [1] and robot satellites [2]. The work in [3] presents a navigation strategy in partially mapped environments.…”

“…This paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 we present the tethered configuration model, in Section 3 a control system is proposed, in Section 4 we present the simulation results and Section 5 presents the conclusions. a e-mail: davifc@ita.br b e-mail: igorap@ita.br c e-mail: mateusfvp@hotmail.com d e-mail: davists@ita.br e e-mail: jmbaltha@ita.br 1 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) 2 Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV)…”

Coordinated stabilization of tumbling targets using tethered space manipulators

“…Nohmi [9][10][11] investigated the arm link to control the TSR's attitude during the deployment phase, and a microgravity experiment was conducted to validate the feasibility of this scheme. Godard [12] designed a nonlinear optimal controller using an inverse optimal technique to control the attitude of a satellite via tether offset variations.…”