Attitude control of spacecraft simulator without angular velocity measurement

In this paper the attitude control of a spacecraft simulator using Reaction Wheels (RW) as the actuators is investigated. The main goal of the current study is to bring the RWs to the rest at the end of the maneuver without angular velocity measurement. A modified feedback linearization controller is applied by considering the Euler angles of the simulator as the output and the RWs angular momentums as the internal state variables. The stability of the proposed controller and the internal dynamics is analyzed using Lyapunov theory. Two modified sliding mode observers are designed to estimate the angular velocities of the spacecraft attitude control subsystem simulator. The proposed observers do not use the control input and the detailed knowledge of the model and thus it can be implemented easily. The global stability of the system is proved. The proposed controller and observers are finally evaluated numerically and experimentally on an attitude spacecraft simulator.