In-flight results of adaptive attitude control law for a microsatellite
Abstract
Because satellites usually do not experience large changes of mass, center of gravity or inertia in orbit, linear time invariant (LTI) controllers have been widely used to control their attitude. But, as the pointing requirements become more stringent and the satellite’s structure more complex with large steerable and/or deployable appendices and flexible modes occurring in the control bandwidth, one unique LTI controller is no longer sufficient. One solution consists in designing several LTI controllers, one for each set point, but the switching between them is difficult to tune and validate. Another interesting solution is to use adaptive controllers, which could present at least two advantages: first, as the controller automatically and continuously adapts to the set point without changing the structure, no switching logic is needed in the software; second, performance and stability of the closed-loop system can be assessed directly on the whole flight domain. To evaluate the real benefits of adaptive control for satellites, in terms of design, validation and performances, CNES selected it as end-of-life experiment on PICARD microsatellite. This paper describes the design, validation and in-flight results of the new adaptive attitude control law, compared to nominal control law.