Attitude maneuver of liquid-filled spacecraft with a flexible appendage by momentum wheel

Attitude maneuver of liquid-filled spacecraft with an appendage as a cantilever beam by momentum wheel is studied. The dynamic equations are derived by conserva- tion of angular momentum and force equilibrium principle. A feedback control strategy of the momentum wheel is ap- plied for the attitude maneuver. The residual nutation of the spacecraft in maneuver process changes with some chosen parameters, such as steady state time, locations of the liq- uid container and the appendage, and appendage parame- ters. The results indicate that locations in the second and fourth quadrants of the body-fixed coordinate system and the second quadrant of the wall of the main body are better choices for.placing the liquid containers and the appendage than other locations if they can be placed randomly. Higher density and thicker cross section are better for lowering the residual nutation if they can be changed. Light appendage can be modeled as a rigid body, which results in a larger residual nutation than a flexible model though. The resid- ual nutation decreases with increasing absolute value of the initial sloshing angular height.

Adaptive variable structure control based on backstepping for spacecraft with reaction wheels during attitude maneuver

An adaptive variable structure control method based on backstepping is proposed for the attitude maneuver problem of rigid spacecraft with reaction wheel dynamics in the presence of uncertain inertia matrix and external disturbances. The proposed control approach is a combination of the backstepping and the adaptive variable structure control. The cascaded structure of the attitude maneuver control system with reaction wheel dynamics gives the advantage for applying the backstepping method to construct Lyapunov functions. The robust stability to external disturbances and parametric uncertainty is guaranteed by the adaptive variable structure control. To validate the proposed control algorithm, numerical simulations using the proposed approach are performed for the attitude maneuver mission of rigid spacecraft with a configuration consisting of four reaction wheels for actuator and three magnetorquers for momentum unloading. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.

Variable structure attitude maneuver and vibration control of flexible spacecraft

A dual-stage control system design method is presented for the three-axis-rotational maneuver and vibration stabilization of a spacecraft with flexible appendages embedded with piezoceramics as sensor and actuator. In this design approach, the attitude control and the vibration suppression sub-systems are designed separately using the lower order model. The design of attitude controller is based on the variable structure control (VSC) theory leading to a discontinuous control law. This controller accomplishes asymptotic attitude maneuvering in the closed-loop system and is insensitive to the interaction of elastic modes and uncertainty in the system. To actively suppress the flexible vibrations, the modal velocity feedback control method is presented by using piezoelectric materials as additional sensor and actuator bonded on the surface of the flexible appendages. In addition, a special configuration of actuators for three-axis attitude control is also investigated: the pitch attitude controlled by a momentum wheel, and the roll/yaw control achieved by on-off thrusters, which is modulated by pulse width pulse frequency modulation technique to construct the proper control torque history. Numerical simulations performed show that the rotational maneuver and vibration suppression are accomplished in spite of the presence of disturbance torque and parameter uncertainty.

Adaptive Integral-type Sliding Mode Control for Spacecraft Attitude Maneuvering Under Actuator Stuck Failures

A fault tolerant control （FTC） design technique against actuator stuck faults is investigated using integral-type sliding mode control （ISMC） with application to spacecraft attitude maneuvering control system. The principle of the proposed FTC scheme is to design an integral-type sliding mode attitude controller using on-line parameter adaptive updating law to compensate for the effects of stuck actuators. This adaptive law also provides both the estimates of the system parameters and external disturbances such that a prior knowledge of the spacecraft inertia or boundedness of disturbances is not required. Moreover, by including the integral feedback term, the designed controller can not only tolerate actuator stuck faults, but also compensate the disturbances with constant components. For the synthesis of controller, the fault time, patterns and values are unknown in advance, as motivated from a practical spacecraft control application. Complete stability and performance analysis are presented and illustrative simulation results of application to a spacecraft show that high precise attitude control with zero steady-error is successfully achieved using various scenarios of stuck failures in actuators.

Heteroclinic bifurcations in attitude maneuver of coupled slosh-spacecraft with flexible appendage

In this paper, the chaotic dynamics in an attitude transition maneuver of a slosh-spacecraft coupled with flexible appendage in going from minor axis to major axis spin under the influence of dissipative effects due to fuel slosh and a small flexible appendage constrained to only torsional vibration is investigated. The slosh-spacecraft coupled with flexible appendage in attitude maneuver carrying a sloshing liquid is considered as multi-body system with the sloshing motion modeled as a spherical pendulum. The focus in this paper is that the dynamics of the liquid and flexible appendage vibration are coupled. The equations of motion are derived and transformed into a form suitable for the application of Melnikov’s method. Melnikov’s integral is used to predict the transversal intersections of the stable and unstable manifolds for the perturbed system. An analytical criterion for chaotic motion is derived in terms of system parameters. This criterion is evaluated for its significance to the design of spacecraft. The dependence of the onset of chaos on quantities such as body shape and magnitude of damping values, fuel fraction and torsional vibration frequency of flexible appendage are investigated. In addition, we show that a spacecraft carrying a sloshing liquid, after passive reorientation maneuver, will end up with periodic limit motion other than a final major axis spin because of the intrinsic non-linearity of fuel slosh. Furthermore, an extensive numerical simulation is carried out to validate the Melnikov’s analytical result.

Spacecraft attitude maneuver control using two parallel mounted 3-DOF spherical actuators

A parallel configuration using two 3-degree-of-freedom（3-DOF） spherical electromagnetic momentum exchange actuators is investigated for large angle spacecraft attitude maneuvers.First, the full dynamic equations of motion for the spacecraft system are derived by the NewtonEuler method. To facilitate computation, virtual gimbal coordinate frames are established. Second,a nonlinear control law in terms of quaternions is developed via backstepping method. The proposed control law compensates the coupling torques arising from the spacecraft rotation, and is robust against the external disturbances. Then, the singularity problem is analyzed. To avoid singularities, a modified weighed Moore-Pseudo inverse velocity steering law based on null motion is proposed. The weighted matrices are carefully designed to switch the actuators and redistribute the control torques. The null motion is used to reorient the rotor away from the tilt angle saturation state. Finally, numerical simulations of rest-to-rest maneuvers are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Chaotic attitude and reorientation maneuver for completely liquid-filled spacecraft with flexible appendage

The present paper investigates the chaotic attitude dynamics and reorientation maneuver for completely viscous liquid-filled spacecraft with flexible appendage. All of the equations of motion are derived by using Lagrangian mechanics and then transformed into a form consisting of an unperturbed part plus perturbed terms so that the system＇s nonlinear characteristics can be exploited in phase space. Emphases are laid on the chaotic attitude dynamics produced from certain sets of physical parameter values of the spacecraft when energy dissipation acts to derive the body from minor to major axis spin. Numerical solutions of these equations show that the attitude dynamics of liquid-filled flexible spacecraft possesses characteristics common to random, non- periodic solutions and chaos, and it is demonstrated that the desired reorientation maneuver is guaranteed by using a pair of thruster impulses. The control strategy for reorientation maneuver is designed and the numerical simulation results are presented for both the uncontrolled and controlled spins transition.

Maneuver and vibration reduction of flexible spacecraft using sliding mode/command shaping technique

A generalized scheme based on the sliding mode and component synthesis vibration suppression (CSVS) method has been proposed for the rotational maneuver and vibration suppression of an orbiting spacecraft with flexible appendages. The proposed control design process is twofold: design of the attitude controller followed by the design of a flexible vibration attenuator. The attitude controller using only the attitude and the rate information for the flexible spacecraft (FS) is designed to serve two purposes: it forces the attitude motion onto a pre-selected sliding surface and then guides it to the state space origin. The shaped command input controller based on the CSVS method is designed for the reduction of the flexible mode vibration, which only requires information about the natural frequency and damping of the closed system. This information is used to discretize the input so that minimum energy is injected via the controller to the flexible modes of the spacecraft. Additionally, to extend the CSVS method to the system with the on-off actuators, the pulse-width pulse-frequency (PWPF) modulation is introduced to control the thruster firing and integrated with the CSVS method. PWPF modulation is a control method that provides pseudo-linear operation for an on-off thruster. The proposed control strategy has been implemented on a FS, which is a hub with symmetric cantilever flexible beam appendages and can undergo a single axis rotation. The results have been proven the potential of this technique to control FS.

Flexible Satellite Attitude Control via Adaptive Fuzzy Linearization

The adaptive fuzzy control is combined with input-output linearization control to constitute the hybrid controller. The control method is then applied to the attitude maneuver control of the flexible satellite. The basic control structure is given. The rules of the controller parameter selection, which guarantee the attitude stabilization of the satellite with parameter uncertainties, have been analyzed. Simulation results show that the precise attitude control is accomplished in spite of the uncertainty in the system.

Exponential Time-varying Sliding Mode Control for Large Angle Attitude Eigenaxis Maneuver of Rigid Spacecraft

An eigenaxis maneuver strategy with global robustness is studied for large angle attitude maneuver of rigid spacecraft. A sliding mode attitude control algorithm with an exponential time-varying sliding surface is designed, which guarantees the sliding mode occurrence at the beginning and eliminates the reaching phase of time-invariant sliding mode control. The proposed control law is global robust against matched external disturbances and system uncertainties, and ensures the eigenaxis rotation in the presence of disturbances and parametric uncertainties. The stability of the control law and the existence of global siding mode are proved by Lyapunov method. Furthermore, the system states can be fully predicted by the analytical solution of state equations, which indicates that the attitude error does not exhibit any overshoots and the system has a good dynamic response. A control torque command regulator is introduced to ensure the eigenaxis rotation under the actuator saturation. Finally, a numerical simulation is employed to illustrate the advantages of the proposed control law.

The output torque estimation of MCMG for agile satellites

Studied in this paper are the attitude control law design and the output torque estimation problem of micro control moment gyros （MCMGs） for the agile satellites executing rapid attitude maneuver mission. An algorithm is proposed for estimating the output torques and the gimbal angular rates of MCMGs, which can help engineers to choose reasonable size for actuators so that the cost of satellite can be decreased. According to some special maneuver missions, a numerical example of attitude control system for a small satellite with MCMGs in pyramid configuration is studied, and the simulation results validate the proposed estimation algorithm.

Vibration control of flexible spacecraft actuated by piezoceramics via variable structure strategy

This paper presented a hybrid control scheme to vibration reduction of flexible spacecraft during rotational maneuver by using variable structure output feedback control （VSOFC） and piezoelectric materials. The control configuration included the attitude controller based on VSOFC method and vibration attenuator designed by constant-gain negative velocity feedback control. The attitude controller consisted of a linear feedback term and a discontinuous feedback term. With the presence of this attitude controller, an additional flexible control system acting on the flexible parts can be designed for vibration control. Compared with conventional proportional-derivative （PD） control, the developed control scheme guarantees not only the stability of the closed-loop system, but also yields better performance and robustness in the presence of parametric uncertainties and externai disturbance. Simulation results are presented for the spacecraft model to show the effectiveness of the proposed control techniques.

Component synthesis vibration suppression method of two component forces for flexible spacecraft

Considering the characteristics of two component forces on component synthesis vibration suppression （CSVS） method, two theorems on two component forces suppressing fractional multiple design frequency are given respectively. Meanwhile, the control force, which is composed by two arbitrary component forces with different initial time, can suppress certain frequencies for second-order undamped vibration system. Using the above theorems, control moment of jet attitude maneuver on flexible spacecraft is designed on the basis principle of CSVS method. The simulations validate the correctness and effectiveness of the orooosed method.

Coordinated Multiple Spacecraft Attitude Control with Communication Time Delays and Uncertainties

In this paper, we consider the coordinated attitude control problem of spacecraft formation with communication delays, model and disturbance uncertainties, and propose novel synchronized control schemes. Since the attitude motion is essential in non-Euclidean space, thus, unlike the existing designs which describe the delayed relative attitude via linear algorithm, we treat the attitude error and the local relative attitude on the nonlinear manifold-Lie group, and attempt to obtain coupling attitude in- formation by the natural quatemion multiplication. Our main focus is to address two problems： 1） Propose a coordinated attitude controller to achieve the synchronized attitude maneuver, i.e., synchronize multiple spacecraft attitudes and track a time-varying desired attitude; 2） With known model information, we achieve the synchronized attitude maneuver with disturbances under angular velocity constraints. Especially, if the formation does not have any uncertainties, the designer can simply set the control- ler via an appropriate choice of control gains to avoid system actuator saturation. Our controllers are proposed based on the Lyapunov-Krasovskii method and simulation of a spacecraft formation is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of theoreti- cal results.

Attitude Guidance Algorithms for Agile Satellite Dynamic Imaging

Dynamic imaging modes are increasingly crucial for agile satellites to perform complicated Earth observation tasks.In this study,a direct guidance algorithm is developed to calculate the reference attitude and velocity for dynamic imaging mode from target geolocation information while considering the constraints on both the satellite camera boresight axis and the image motion vector.The two slew angles are determined directly,and no rotation around the boresight or reference vector is required.The proposed approach employs a direct solution instead of the iterative process to obtain the reference attitude,which releases the onboard control system from the intensive computational load.To illustrate the performance of the proposed guidance algorithms,numerical simulation results are presented.

Identification and standardization of maneuvers based upon operational flight data

To find a way of loads analysis from operational flight data for advanced aircraft,maneuver identification and standardization jobs are conducted in this paper. For thousands of sorties from one aircraft, after studying the flight attitude when performing actions, the start and end time of the maneuvers can be determined. According to those time points, various types of maneuvers during the flight are extracted in the form of multi-parameters time histories. By analyzing the numerical range and curve shape of those parameters, a characteristic data library is established to model all types of maneuvers. Based on this library, a computer procedure using pattern-recognition theory is programmed to conduct automatic maneuver identification with high accuracy. In that way, operational loads are classified according to maneuver type. For a group of identified maneuvers of the same type, after the processes of time normalization, trace shifting, as well as averaging and smoothing, the idealization standard time history of each maneuver type is established.Finally, the typical load statuses are determined successfully based on standard maneuvers. The proposed method of maneuver identification and standardization is able to derive operational loads effectively, and might be applied to monitoring loads in Individual Aircraft Tracking Program（IATP）.