Direct Adaptive Control Treatment to Loss of Attitude Control Actuators

What is it about?

Satellite mission life, especially for commercial Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) missions, has recently been aimed at reaching its 20 years life of services. This goal, driven by customers’ demand and competitive market, has challenged Attitude Control Subsystems (ACS) engineers to develop adequate ACS algorithms to accommodate this extended life of services in the presence of limited and aging hardware components (i.e., ACS sensors and actuators). This paper investigates an attractive ACS scheme, which is designed as a combination of direct adaptive controller and (any) typical baseline fixed gain PID controller, to maintain the satellite pointing accuracy subject to loss of one or two reaction wheels out of its four wheels assembly mounted in a pyramid configuration. The robust performance characteristics of the direct adaptive control or simple adaptive control (SAC) and its ability to co-exist with a baseline PID controller to effectively provide the right treatment to flight control input saturation, are now exploited to explore its potential services to the actuator failure correction and accommodation.

Featured Image

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash