Attitude Determination and Control for CubeSats
Paper ID : 1091-IUGRC6
Authors
Ahmed Mohamed Yousef *1, Mohammed Khaled Shahat2
1Elsafa
2Guidance Department, MTC
Abstract
Recently, CubeSats have been becoming economically attractive in many applications. As they provide cheap
facilities to validate new ideas using the advanced technologies and payloads. Reaction wheels (RWs) are an effective solution and rely on the simple principle of conservation of angular momentum.
The objective of this project is to develop an attitude control system (ACS) to acheive a pre-desiged mission for a Cubesat graduation project using a low-cost and reliable reaction wheel, the mission is called MTCsat. A two axis balanced sticks (inverted pendulum) actuator is desired to implement the attitude determination and control subsystems (ADCS). The mathematical model of the inverted pendulum reaction wheel is obtained using the sensor measurements. The attitude determination is calculated using quaternion algorithm and implemented using PID controller by linearizing the system model. In this project, the proposed control approach is validated by a hardware implementation using a reaction wheel actuator with a suitable encoder.
Keywords
Cubesat Attitude Control, Inverted Pendulum Reaction wheel, PID control
Status: Accepted