Fully-Actuated Spin-up Control of the Spinning Electrodynamic Tether System

This paper mainly studies the spin-up control of a linear three-body spinning electrodynamic tether formation. The main challenge of the tether formation is that there is a severe coupling between the dual tethers, which can easily cause tether slack and affect the stability of the system. Given the fully-actuated nature of the aforementioned system in the Lagrangian model, which facilitates the design of high-performance controllers, a controller utilizing fully-actuated methodologies was proposed specifically for the spin-up process. Firstly, the rigid Lagrangian model and flexible lumped model were established. Then, based on the fully-actuated theory, a fully-actuated controller was designed. The numerical results show that the fully-actuated control can effectively suppress the tether coupling and slackening effect during the spin-up.