Decentralized fault tolerant control for tethered formation spacecraft

This paper investigates the attitude control problem of a three-inline array tethered spacecraft in two-dimensional plane. The three-spacecraft array is decoupled into three individual dynamics. A feedback control law is proposed to stabilize the center spacecraft. For the single-tethered spacecrafts at the tips, a partially simplified nonlinear model is presented. Considering the coupling property between two angles of the single-tethered spacecraft, a decentralized controller is constructed. The issue of fault tolerant control is further discussed. Numerical simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.