Attitude Control of Spacecraft Simulator with Reaction Wheels Regulation

In this paper the attitude control of a spacecraft simulator using Reaction Wheels (RW) as the actuators is investigated. The simulator attitude is controlled considering the saturation of RWs angular momentum and its angular rate. The main goal of the current study is to bring the RW s to the rest at the end of the maneuver without using extra actuators. A modified feedback linearization is applied to control the attitude of the system. To this end, the Euler angles of the simulator are considered as the output and the RWs angular momentums are assumed as the internal state variables. The internal dynamics stability is proved by rewriting the dynamics of the system in normal form. The stability of the proposed controller is analyzed using Lyapunov stability approach. The proposed algorithm is finally evaluated numerically and experimentally on an attitude spacecraft simulator.