Spacecraft Attitude and Reaction Wheel Desaturation Combined Control Method

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified control method for spacecraft attitude and reaction wheel desaturation using magnetic torque coils, employing a periodic time-varying linear quadratic regulator to optimize both tasks simultaneously.

Contribution

It formulates a combined control problem for attitude and desaturation and proposes a novel LQR-based solution that addresses both tasks concurrently.

Findings

Improved control performance demonstrated in simulations.

Unified approach reduces complexity of separate control strategies.

Effective management of reaction wheel momentum and attitude control.

Abstract

Two popular types of spacecraft actuators are reaction wheels and magnetic torque coils. Magnetic torque coils are particularly interesting because they can be used for both attitude control and reaction wheel momentum management (desaturation control). Although these two tasks are performed at the same time using the same set of actuators, most design methods deal with only one of the these tasks or consider these two tasks separately. In this paper, a design with these two tasks in mind is formulated as a single problem. A periodic time-varying linear quadratic regulator design method is then proposed to solve this problem. A simulation example is provided to describe the benefit of the new strategy.