Optimal control of a tethered subsatellite of three degrees of freedom

The paper presents the optimal control of the deployment and retrieval processes of a tethered subsatellite system of three degrees of freedom, which takes not only the in-plane motion, but also the out-of-plane motions, into account. After the statement of the optimal control problem of the tethered subsatellite system based on the dynamic equation of the system, with the control cost and the state constraints included, the paper introduces the quasilinearization and the truncated Chebyshev series to approximate the state variables of the system such that the original problem of constrained nonlinear optimal control is simplified into a set of linear quadratic programming problems which can be easily solved. The case studies in the paper not only support the new method, but also show that the controlled trajectories of the deployment process and the retrieval process are geometrically symmetric to each other with respect to the local vertical axis, and that the subsatellite always undergoes a slow, damped oscillation when it is in the beginning of a deployment process or at the end of a retrieval process.