  The challenge of satellite stabilization, particularly those with uncertain
flexible dynamics, has become a pressing concern in control and robotics. These
uncertainties, especially the dynamics of a third-party client satellite,
significantly complicate the stabilization task. This paper introduces a novel
adaptive detumbling method to handle non-rigid satellites with unknown motion
dynamics (translation and rotation). The distinctive feature of our approach is
that we model the non-rigid tumbling satellite as a two-link serial chain with
unknown stiffness and damping in contrast to previous detumbling research works
which consider the satellite a rigid body. We develop a novel adaptive robotics
approach to detumble the satellite by using two space tugs as servicer despite
the uncertain dynamics in the post-capture case. Notably, the stiffness
properties and other physical parameters, including the mass and inertia of the
two links, remain unknown to the servicer. Our proposed method addresses the
challenges in detumbling tasks and paves the way for advanced manipulation of
non-rigid satellites with uncertain dynamics.
