The attitude dynamics and manoeuvre survey in this paper is performed for a mission scenario involving a penetrator-type spacecraft, a semi-rigid axisymmetric prolate spacecraft spinning around its minor axis of inertia, requested to perform a 90° spin axis reorientation manoeuvre. In contrast to most existing spacecraft only one attitude control torque is available, perpendicular to the spin a...

Current low-cost solutions to guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) of a small unmanned vehicle (underwater, ground, marine surface, or flight) still cost several thousands of dollars, and offer relatively poor performance at that price point. Tactical grade inertial navigation solutions (INS) run in the several tens of thousands of dollars, and often come with data restrictions due to arms t...

A numerical solution algorithm has been developed to solve a generalization of Wahba's attitude determination problem to the case of unknown attitude and attitude rate. It provides a robust global solution to nonlinear batch attitude and rate estimation problems for spinning spacecraft. The original Wahba problem seeks the attitude that fits a set of unit-normalized direction vector measurement...

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the coordinated attitude control problem without velocity measurements. Based on the recently introduced unit quaternion output feedback for the attitude tracking of a rigid body, we present a class of decentralized coordinated control laws to solve the alignment problem for a group of spacecraft within a formation without velocity measurements. The approach...

This paper describes a biped walking control system based on the reactive force interaction control at the foothold. 1) robust control of reactive force/torque interaction at the foothold based on Cartesian space motion controller. 2) the posture control considering the physical constraints of the reactive force/torque at the foothold by quadratic programming. The proposed approach realizes the...

In this paper we analyze attitude tracking of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle by employing a recently developed feedback strategy based upon hybrid systems theory. The hybrid feedback control strategy employs a family of synergistic potential functions on the special orthogonal group of order three, SO(3), that guarantees global asymptotic stability of a rigid bodies attitude to a given ref...

A new attitude sensor is proposed that consists of a single global positioning system (GPS) antenna mounted on a turntable with its phase center offset from the turntable's spin axis. It is being considered as a means of sensing 3-axis attitude information. It is attractive because its GPS receiver could have a low number of channels and, therefore, be smaller and use less power. The system sen...

This paper presents an investigation into the design of a flight control system, using a robust backstepping control structure, designed using the two-time scale control procedure of the dynamic of a small-size autonomous helicopter in hover. The two-time scale controller takes advantage of the ‘decoupling’ of the translational and rotational dynamics of the rigid body, resulting in a two-level...

This paper presents a novel attitude determination and control solution for a three cube nanosatellite performing science operations in low Earth orbit. The spacecraft is tasked with studying the water content of Earth’s upper atmosphere by taking radiometer measurements along the 183 GHz absorption line. The radiometer must be calibrated against the cold of deep space, and this calibration nec...