Reorientation Control for a Microsatellite with Pointing and Angular Velocity Constraints

An attitude reorientation control is proposed for a microsatellite with pointing and angular velocity constraints. In order to guarantee the measure performances of the optical instruments equipped on the microsatellite, these optical instruments are required to point their boresight along a target direction while keeping away from direct exposure to the bright celestial bodies. However, the limited space of the microsatellite may lead to a more complicated attitude path planning compared with the traditional large spacecrafts. In this paper, a reorientation control method integrating the logarithmic convex potential function with the fixed barrier Lyapunov function is introduced to solve the attitude path planning issue. Comparing with the existing on-line path planning methods, the proposed method can efficiently reduce the computation burden and is very fit for the microsatellite with low computation ability. Moreover, the angular velocity constraints caused by saturation limitation of low-rate gyro or mission specification requirement are also well tackled by the proposed method. The ultimate uniformly stabilization for the closed-loop system is achieved without violating the considered constraints. Finally, the simulations are verified in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed reorientation control method for a microsatellite.