Integrated vibration suppression attitude control for flexible spacecrafts with internal liquid sloshing

Abstract

Vibration suppression during attitude control is a fundamental research topic whenever control of the rotational motion of a spacecraft with flexible appendages and internal liquid sloshing is of interest. The proposed method is based on an attitude control system with centralized sensors and actuators, without the usage of collocated devices for vibration management. In this way, it is possible to develop and implement a computationally efficient real-time control system that is suitable for any kind of spacecraft, even with advanced control capabilities. An integrated vibration suppression attitude control is designed and analyzed, exploiting also a numerical simulation verification procedure based on validated code. The developed attitude control system applies two fundamental control schemes: classical proportional-derivative (PD) control, with nonadaptive band-stop filters, and wave-based control. The proposed wave-based control implementation allows managing three-dimensional attitude dynamics in steady state pointing, without cross-coupling between the separate body axes. To overcome this limitation, the paper presents the integration of the wave-based control with the filtered PD control scheme, allowing us to have a complete three-dimensional real-time MIMO controller, with vibration suppression capabilities and robustness to system uncertainties. The paper also presents the development of an accurate dynamical model of a generic flexible spacecraft with internal liquid sloshing based on a multibody formulation. Keywords Flexible spacecrafts • Internal liquid sloshing • Vibration suppression • PD attitude control • Wave-based attitude control 1 Introduction Vibration suppression during attitude control of flexible spacecrafts with internal liquid sloshing is an active research topic intriguing the space engineering community for many B A. Colagrossi

Wave-based attitude control of in-orbit spacecraft with large-amplitude slosh

“…First, according to the inherent properties of the wave model, the returning wave component B 0i in the i th ði ¼ 1; 2; 3Þ attitude channel can be calculated in the Laplace domain by using the measured values of ε i and T Wi (Colagrossi and Lavagna, 2021)…”

“…Second, the wave-based control law is designed as (Thompson and O'Connor, 2016;Colagrossi and Lavagna, 2021)…”

“…First, according to the inherent properties of the wave model, the returning wave component B0i in the ith(i=1,2,3) attitude channel can be calculated in the Laplace domain by using the measured values of εi and TWi (Colagrossi and Lavagna, 2021)in which H0i, P0i, and Q0i are the transfer functions for the ith attitude channel, and they are given asin which the associated physical parameters m1i, m0i, and k0i should be tuned to reach th...…”

“…Second, the wave-based control law is designed as (Thompson and O’Connor, 2016; Colagrossi and Lavagna, 2021)in which εitar is the quaternion of the target attitude and b0i is the value in the time domain of B0i.…”

“…Thompson and O’Connor (2016) designed a wave-based controller for in-plane small-angle attitude maneuver of an upper stage accelerating rocket with small-amplitude slosh in a single tank. Colagrossi and Lavagna (2021) improved a three-dimensional real-time MIMO wave-based controller for flexible spacecraft with liquid sloshing replaced by mass–spring–damper slosh model. The above works all consider the control of liquid-filled dynamics system by using small-amplitude slosh models; however, further research is demanded on the three-dimensional attitude control of liquid-filled spacecraft when the liquid is expected to experience more complicated motion such as large-amplitude nonplanar lateral sloshing and rotary sloshing.…”