Experimental demonstration of a classical approach to flexible structure control

Abstract

This paper describes the results of active structural control experiments performed for the ACES testbed at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center as part of the NASA Control-Structure Interaction Phase I Guest Investigator Program. The experimental results successfully demonstrate the effectiveness of a dipole concept for line-of-sight control of a pointing system mounted on a flexible structure. The simplicity and effectiveness of a classical single-loop-at-a-time approach for the active structural control design for a complex structure such as the ACES testbed are demonstrated. Consequently, the theoretical aspects of large space structure control problems are not elaborated in this paper.