Decentralized adaptive sliding mode control for beam synchronization of tethered InSAR system

Beam synchronization problem of tethered interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is addressed in this paper. Two antennas of the system are carried by separate satellites connected through a tether to obtain a preferable baseline. A Total Zero Doppler Steering (TZDS) is implemented to mother-satellite to cancel the residual Doppler. Subsequently attitude reference trajectories for the two satellites are generated to achieve the beam synchronization and TZDS. Thereafter, a decentralized adaptive sliding mode control law is proposed to track these reference trajectories in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances. Finally, the stability of closed-loop system is proved by the corollary of Barbalat's Lemma. Simulation results show the proposed control law is effective to achieve beam synchronization of the system.