Large angle attitude control of spacecraft with actuator saturation

Abstract

This paper presents spacecraft large angle attitude control problem with actuator saturation limit. Traditional approach for control design for the spacecraft large angle maneuver is a fixed gain proportional plus integral plus derivative (PID) controller using quaternion attitude variables with stability guarantee. Unwanted external disturbance inputs may induce excessively large error by the PID control. Anti-windup control and intelligent integrator are effective in reducing the rapid build up of the control signal due to, in particular, integral control action. Application of the anti-windup and intelligent integrator which already have been studied extensively in other areas is made to the large angle feedback controller minimizing reaction wheel type actuator saturation. Conventional PID controller is modified by augmenting additional control actions for the purpose of performance improvement.