Quaternion models of a rigid body rotation motion and their application for spacecraft attitude control

Abstract

The success of the solution to the task of controlling the spacecraft’s angular motion around its centre of mass largely depends on the chosen model of the spacecraft’s angular motion. In this paper, the spacecraft’s angular motion dynamic models, described with second-order quaternionic differential equations, are proposed. The proposed models use only quaternionic calculus. The spacecraft attitude control algorithms’ synthesis using these models are considered. Using the example of solving the reorientation problem, it is shown that the use of the proposed models allows one to obtain analytical solutions to problems of synthesis of control algorithms for spacecraft. In this case, the control algorithms are much easier to implement than the algorithms obtained using the traditional model.