Experimental verification of chaotic control of an underactuated tethered satellite system

This paper studies chaotic control of a tethered satellite system (TSS) driven only by a momentum-exchange device during its attitude adjustment. In dealing with such the underactuated system, an extended time-delay autosynchronization (ETDAS) is employed to stabilize the chaotic motion to a periodic motion. To obtain the control domains of the ETDAS method, a stability analysis of the controlled tethered satellite system in elliptical orbit is implemented. According to the principle of dynamic similarity, then, ground-based experiment setups are proposed and designed to emulate the in-plane motions of the TSS. Representative experiments are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ETDAS scheme in controlling the chaotic motion of the underactuated TSS.