Microsatellite Yaw-axis Attitude Control System Using Model Reference Adaptive Control Based PID Controller

Abstract

This paper presents a Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) based Proportional Integral and Derivative (PID) controller for microsatellite yaw-axis Attitude Control System (ACS). The objective is to combine the algorithm of MRAC with PID to improve the performance of a microsatellite system especially settling time. MRAC based PID controller for yaw-axis ACS was modelled and simulated in MATLAB/Simulink to meet transient response characteristics specifications. The performance of the system was evaluated in terms of rise time, settling time, maximum overshoot, and steady-state error including energy consumption measured based on armature voltage of the direct current motor. The simulation results revealed that the proposed system meets all the performance specifications and outperformed classical PID controller for adaption gain of 0.2 to 20. When compared with PID and Proportional Derivative (PD) based Controllers in previous study for adaption gain of 10, 15, and 20, the proposed system proved to be superior. Generally, the choice of the MRAC based PID controller considering the range of adaption gain (γ = 0.1 to 20) should be based on either transient response advantage or energy consumption or even both over PID controller. The significance of this study is that an MRAC based PID controller that offered wide range of adaption capability for microsatellite ACS has been proposed.