Attitude control law design for spacecraft large angle maneuvers is investigated in this paper. The feedback linearization technique is applied to the design of a nonlinear tracking control law. The output function to be tracked is the quaternion attitude parameter. The designed control law turns out to be a combination of attitude and attitude rate tracking command. The attitude-only output fu...

Attitude quaternion [1] is the attitude parameterization of choice for spacecraft attitude estimation for several reasons: 1) it is free of singularities, 2) the attitude matrix is quadratic in the quaternion components, and 3) the kinematics equations is bilinear and an analytic solution exists for the propagation. However, the components of the attitude quaternion are not independent of each ...

The performances of three attitude determination algorithms are compared in this paper. The three methods are the Complementary Filter, a Quaternion-based Kalman Filter and a Quaternion-based Gradient Descent Algorithm. An analysis of their performance based on an experimental investigation was undertaken. This paper shows that the Complementary Filter requires the least computational power; Qu...

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the coordinated attitude control problem without velocity measurements. Based on the recently introduced unit quaternion output feedback for the attitude tracking of a rigid body, we present a class of decentralized coordinated control laws to solve the alignment problem for a group of spacecraft within a formation without velocity measurements. The approach...

This paper proposed a nonlinear robust control for spacecraft attitude based on passivity and disturbance suppression vector. The spacecraft model was described using quaternion. The control law introduced the suppression vector of external disturbances and had no information related to the system parameters. The desired performance of spacecraft attitude control could be achieved using the des...

A new spacecraft attitude estimation approach based on the Unscented Filter is derived. For nonlinear systems the Unscented Filter uses a carefully selected set of sample points to more accurately map the probability distribution than the linearization of the standard Extended Kalman Filter, leading to faster convergence from inaccurate initial conditions in attitude estimation problems. The fi...

In this work, we address the problem of global attitude control using direct inertial measurements. When using direct inertial measurement to observe the rigid body attitude, it is shown that due to a geometrical obstruction, it is impossible to achieve global asymptotic stability. In fact, for a particular initial condition the tracking error quaternion converges to a pure imaginary quaternion...