Prescribed performance sliding mode control for safe de-tumbling a rolling target by eddy current

Accelerated by in-orbit explosions, collisions and other fragmentation events, the population of space debris is increasing sharply. Many of these space debris are spinning at high speed. Traditional space capture technologies cannot directly capture the high speed spinning non-cooperative targets. In order to reduce the spinning speed of the target, eddy current break is considered as one of the most promising methods because of the non-contact nature. Unfortunately, efficiency and safety concerns prevent its further application in space. Focus on this issue, the desired trajectory is calculated in this paper with a perpendicular configuration between the chaser and the target. Meanwhile, the safety constraint is considered to eliminate potential collision risk. Furthermore, a sliding model control (SMC) is designed to guarantee the chaser tracking the desired trajectory, where prescribed performance function is adopted to ensure the state error within the safety constraint. Finally, numerical simulation is performed to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed control algorithm.