Self-stabilising attitude control for spinning tethered formations

The paper analyses the dynamics of a spinning tethered formation where the tethered units are modelled as extended rigid bodies. The system, composed by two platforms linked by a flexible tether a few hundreds of meters long, constitutes the building block of more complex tethered architectures utilised in proposed space interferometry missions. The issue investigated herein is the transfer of a collimated beam from one platform to another in the presence of environmental perturbations and structural vibrations affecting the position and attitude of the two tethered units. We propose to damp residual oscillations and limit the effect of environmental torques with the aid of two passive dampers placed at the tether attachment point. When the damping system is properly tuned, this approach has the considerable advantage of rapidly bringing the system to a minimum energy configuration (zero residual vibrations) without any external control force. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy and provide an important element towards the implementation of future space-based observatories and formation-flying demonstration mission based on tether-connected architectures.