In this paper we present an experimental platform for relative attitude control of spacecraft. The platform is part of the AUVSAT project at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, a project with the goal of creating an underwater experimental laboratory for formation control of underwater vehicles and spacecraft. In the following we present the design and the specifications leading...

This paper deals with the applicability of Robust Adaptive Control to the attitude motion control of large spacecraft. Large spacecraft and space structures, such as large communication satellites and the ISS (International Space Station), have been constructed on orbit. However dynamic characteristics of these structures can not be fully verified on the ground because of their size, mass and f...

The paper presents a quaternion feedback attitude control law for spacecraft attitude maneuver. A nonlinear feedback controller is designed to achieve L2 gain performance, i.e., the resulting closed-loop system is designed such that the L2 gain from the exogenous disturbance to the performance measure is less than a scalar. The solution of the nonlinear H∞ control problem is known to be related...

Virginia Tech has developed a testbed comprised of two independent spherical air-bearing platforms for formation flying attitude control simulation, the Distributed Spacecraft Attitude Control System Simulator. The DSACSS is intended to support a wide range of functions; as such, requiring that all controllers be robust to approximations of the system parameters is impractical. We document the ...

This paper addresses kinematic control of a redundant space manipulator mounted on a freeoating spacecraft. Redundancy of the system with respect to the number of task variables for spacecraft attitude and manipulator end-e ector pose is considered. Also, the problem of both spacecraft attitude and end-e ector orientation representation is tackled. A nonminimal singularity-free representation o...

This guideline provides a procedure which specifies and documents consistent, useful, and welldefined coordinate system (or frame) definitions for spacecraft attitude control design and analysis. Several example coordinate frames and transformations are presented to show how these definitions are used to address various Attitude Control System (ACS) design issues. Past experience has shown the ...

In this article, the issue of attitude control and active vibration suppression of a nonlinear flexible spacecraft is assessed through piezoelectric patches as actuator and sensors. Two controller loops are applied: the inner loop, to make the panel vibration damped through piezoelectric patches; and the outer loop, to perform spacecraft maneuver using the reaction wheel acting on the hub. An o...

This paper addresses the distributed attitude synchronization problem of multiple spacecraft with unknown inertia matrices. Two distributed adaptive controllers are proposed for the cases with and without a virtual leader to which a time-varying reference attitude is assigned. The first controller achieves attitude synchronization for a group of spacecraft with a leaderless communication topolo...

This paper proposes a dynamic analytical initialization method for spacecraft attitude estimators. In the proposed method, the desired attitude matrix is decomposed into two parts: one is the constant attitude matrix at the very start and the other encodes the attitude changes of the body frame from its initial state. The latter one can be calculated recursively using the gyroscope outputs and ...