Adaptive Satellite Attitude Control in the Presence of Inertia and CMG Gimbal Friction Uncertainties

A nonlinear adaptive attitude controller is designed in this paper that compensates for dynamic uncertainties in the spacecraft inertia matrix and unknown dynamic and static friction effects in the control moment gyroscope (CMG) gimbals. Attitude control torques are generated by means of a four single gimbal CMG pyramid cluster. The challenges to develop the adaptive controller are that the control input is multiplied by uncertainties due to dynamic friction effects and is embedded in a discontinuous nonlinearity due to static friction effects. A uniformly ultimately bounded result is proven via Lyapunov analysis for the case in which both static and dynamic gimbal friction is included in the dynamic model, and an extension is provided that illustrates how asymptotic tracking is achieved when only dynamic friction is present in the CMG model