Abstract

Future spacecraft are envisioned as autonomous, miniature, and intelligent space systems. This paper describes the design and implementation of a model predictive control (MPC) system for satellite attitude control. The MPC algorithm is designed to successfully deal with constraints due to the small control torque given by magnetic torques and the Earth’s magnetic field. Laguerre functions are proposed to simplify the implementation of the MPC controller for on-line computation. A control system processor is designed as a peripheral hard core of the system-on-chip for satellite on-board data handling. Targeting the FPGA technology, this processor runs up to 120 MHz.

Keywords

Dynamics; Nanosatellites; Matlab simulations; Magnetorquers; Vernal equinox direction, Orthogonal triad; Quaternion method; Attitude transformation matrix; Euler angle; Laguerre functions; Hildreth’s Quadratic Programming; Xilinx Virtex-4; FPGA technology; Accumulator