Abstract
Latest large spacecraft and/or agility requirements have led to configurations of five or more reaction wheels. To avoid (1) handling a significant amount of pre-stored parameters on board and (2) intervening by ground (classical approach) to recover single- and multiple-wheel failures, the orthogonal null space basis must be robustly computed on board. Two deterministic methods are presented in this paper: (1) via virtual torque commands using L∞ and L2 commanding, (2) via generalized inverse. Furthermore, a cascading null space control approach that autonomously respects predefined wheel momentum operating bands is introduced. The presented work is dedicated to the demand of high on-board autonomy driven by more and more customers requiring just a working spacecraft with minimum interventions by ground. The presented solutions are already part of the Airbus high-power satellite avionics system Astrobus AS400 for current and future missions such as MetOp-SG. Furthermore, the presented functionalities are essential towards on-board real-time spacecraft reconfiguration which is; however, beyond the scope of this paper.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bordignon, K., Durham, W.: Null-space augmented solutions to constrained control allocation problems. In: Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference (Reston, Virigina), American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (1995)
Bordignon, K.: Constrained Control Allocation for Systems with Redundant Control Effectors. PhD thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (1996)
Bordignon, K., Durham, W.: Closed-form solutions to the constrained control allocation problem. In: Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference (Reston, Virigina), American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (1994)
Cadzow, J.A.: Algorithm for the minimum-L-inf-norm problem. IEEE Trans. Autom. Control 16, 60–63 (1971)
Cadzow, J.A.: A finite algorithm for the minimum L-inf solution to a system of consistent linear equations. SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 10(4), 607–611 (1973)
Cadzow, J.A.: An efficient algorithmic procedure for obtaining a minimum L-inf-norm solution to a system of consistent linear equations. SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 11(6), 1115–1151 (1974)
Durham, W.C.: Constrained control allocation. J. Guid. Control Dyn. 16, 717–725 (1993)
Gander, W., Gander, M.J., Kwok, F.: Scientific Computing—An introduction using Maple and MATLAB, Springer (2014)
Markley, F.L., Reynolds, R.G., Liu, F.X., Lebsock, K.L.: Maximum torque and momentum envelopes for reaction-wheel arrays. J. Guid. Control Dyn. 33(5), 1606–1614 (2010)
Markley, F.L., Crassidis, J.L.: Fundamentals of Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control. Springer (2014)
Winkler, S., Schindler, T.: Deterministic L∞ Actuator Commanding for Higher Agility, Larger Offloading Cycle and Less Propellant Consumption Without Changing Hardware. In: Proceedings of the 9th international ESA conference on guidance, navigation and control systems (Porto, Portugal, June 2–6, 2014)
Yanai, H., Takeuchi, K., Takane, Y.: Projection Matrices, Generalized Inverse Matrices, and Singular Value Decomposition. Springer, New York (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Winkler, S., Evers, M. & Kraft, B. Beyond L∞ reaction wheel commanding: increased on-board autonomy through enhanced wheel failure handling. CEAS Space J 10, 597–604 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12567-018-0212-x
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12567-018-0212-x