FPGA Based Attitude Control System Architecture for Increased Performance

For micro-satellites the required attitude accuracy, agility and autonomy along with desired parallel processing of payload images in real-time needs to be achieved within limited power and computational resources. Providing fast, parallel execution while still small in hardware size and modest in power consumption field programmable gate array (FPGA) based on-board computers (OBC) have the potential to highly increase system performance. The Flying Laptop is a micro-satellite currently under development at the Institute of Space Systems, Universität Stuttgart. The attitude control system together with the on-board navigation system is implemented as hardware in an FPGA. The architecture including the sensors, actuators and control algorithms are described in this paper