Fractional order sliding mode control for tethered satellite deployment with disturbances

This paper proposes a fractional order sliding mode control for the deployment of tethered space systems with the consideration of uncertainty of external disturbances and unmodeled system dynamics. The proposed fractional order sliding mode control consists of two sub-sliding manifolds that are defined separately for the actuated and unactuated states. This, in turn, generates a control scheme to make all states move toward to the desired states. The stability analysis of the proposed control law indicates not only all states converge to the desired states at equilibrium but also disturbances caused by the uncertainty can be suppressed satisfactorily. Parametric studies are conducted to investigate the influences of fractional order and sub-sliding manifold of unactuated states on the performance of the proposed control law. The performance is compared with the sliding mode, PD and fractional order PD control laws for a baseline scenario of tether deployment. The proposed control law performs better than others in the settling time and the maximum pitch angle control in the presence of unwanted disturbances. Effectiveness and robustness of the proposed control law are demonstrated by computer simulations.