Attitude Determination and Control for CubeSats

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

MTC, Egypt.

10.21608/iugrc.2022.302668

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 achieve a predesiged 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.

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