Stable cargo transportation for underactuated partial space elevator with model uncertainties and disturbances

Abstract

An adaptive neural network energy-based control approach is proposed in this paper to address the issue of stabilizing a partial space elevator during cargo transportation. The method handles the challenges presented by external disturbances and model uncertainties. The dynamic model of the partial space elevator, with a typical multi-input and multi-output underactuated system, is presented. A control scheme using energy-based techniques is proposed to guarantee the stable configuration of the system, and auxiliary kinematic vector variables are designed to incorporate the uncontrollable variables to constitute controllable state subsets. Under these frameworks, adaptive control schemes are formulated using multi-layer neural networks to mitigate model uncertainty. Robust compensators are designed to effectively counteract the unknown boundaries of external disturbances and approximation errors. The stability of the closed control system is rigorously demonstrated through the application of the Lyapunov function and LaSalle's invariance principle. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed control method is highly effective in suppressing oscillations during the transfer period of a partial space elevator.