Robust Two-Degrees-of-Freedom Attitude Controller Design and Flight Test Result for Engineering Test Satellite-VIII Spacecraft

Abstract

This paper reports flight test results of robust attitude control for the Engineering Test Satellite VIII (ETS-VIII) spacecraft. The main mission of ETS-VIII is to support next-generation mobile digital communications, and for this purpose it is equipped with two large deployable antenna reflectors and a pair of large solar panels that rotate around the pitch axis. We have proposed and demonstrated several control methods for this spacecraft based on advanced control theories for linear parameter varying multi-input multi-output systems, and in this paper we focus on a two-degrees-of-freedom controller. We describe the controller design methods and present the results of on-orbit flight tests. The controller's superiority is demonstrated by comparing its performance with other controllers.