Rigid Body Attitude Control Based on a Manifold Representation of Direction Cosine Matrices

Abstract

Autonomous systems typically actively observe certain aspects of their surroundings, which makes them dependent on a suitable controller. However, building an attitude controller for three degrees of freedom is a challenging task, mainly due to singularities in the different parametrizations of the three dimensional rotation group SO(3). Thus, we propose an attitude controller based on a manifold representation of direction cosine matrices: In state space, the attitude is globally and uniquely represented as a direction cosine matrix R ∈ SO(3). However, differences in the state space, i.e., the attitude errors, are exposed to the controller in the vector space ℝ3. This is achieved by an operator, which integrates the matrix logarithm mapping from SO(3) to so(3) and the map from so(3) to ℝ3. Based on this representation, we derive a proportional and derivative feedback controller, whose output has an upper bound to prevent actuator saturation. Additionally, the feedback is preprocessed by a particle filter to account for measurement and state transition noise. We evaluate our approach in a simulator in three different spacecraft maneuver scenarios: (i) stabilizing, (ii) rest-to-rest, and (iii) nadir-pointing. The controller exhibits stable behavior from initial attitudes near and far from the setpoint. Furthermore, it is able to stabilize a spacecraft and can be used for nadir-pointing maneuvers.