An Indirect Control Method to Stabilize Tension in the Process of Towing Transfer

This paper proposes an indirect control method to stabilize tension for the tethered space system in the process of towing transfer. In the paper, the Kalman filter is designed to estimate the length of the tether and the mass of the debris under the premise that the tension can be measured. The space platform and the debris are both regarded as mass points and the tether is regarded as the massless rigid rod. On the basis of the assumptions, the tension model and the centroid dynamics model are established. And the optimal tether retraction rate is obtained by using the nominal robust model predictive control. The simulation results of our method show that the Kalman filtering method is used for quality identification, and its estimation is close to the real value. The designed control scheme has good control performance and can effectively track the tension step command.