REGULAR PAPER
Robust PID controller for flexible satellite attitude control
under angular velocity and control torque constraint
You Li
1
| Dong Ye
2
1
Xidian University, School of Aerospace
Science and Technology, Xi'an, China
2
Harbin Institute of Technology, Research
Center of Satellite Technology, Harbin,
China
Correspondence
Ye Dong, Harbin Institute of Technology,
Research Center of Satellite Technology,
92 West Dazhi Street, Nan Gang District,
Harbin, China.
Email: yed@hit.edu.cn
Funding information
China Postdoctoral Science Foundation,
Grant/Award Number: 2015 M81455;
National Natural Science Foundation of
China, Grant/Award Numbers: 91638301
and 61603115
Abstract
A PID controller for flexible satellite attitude control with unknown perturba-
tion is proposed in this paper. System inertia uncertainty, stochastic distur-
bance torque, and perturbation of flexible deformation are discussed, and the
controller proposed in this paper is robust to these perturbations. A novel inte-
gral term is designed; hence the Lyapunov function structure is modified and
the stability proof is simplified. The angul ar velocity constraint is discussed
and a novel method to solve the angular velocity saturation issue is given.
The control torque saturation issue is also taken into consideration. Stability
for all conditions considered in this paper is proved by the Lyapunov method.
The performance of the controller is demonstrated by numerical simulation.
KEYWORDS
angular velocity constraint, attitude control, control torque constraint, flexible dynamic, PID
controller, unknown disturbance
1 | INTRODUCTION
Satellite attitude control is one of the most important
issues in space missions. To meet the requirements of
current space missions, high‐prec ision attitude controller
design has become more and more important. However,
the satellite attitude system is affected by many uncertain
factors such as environmental stochastic disturbance
torque, system inertia matrix uncertainty, and distur-
bance torque caused by flexible deformation. These issues
pose a huge challenge for attitude controller design and it
is necessary to design high‐accuracy controllers that are
robust to these perturbations.
PID control is the most mature and widely used con-
trol algorithm in the field of satellite attitude systems.
Fundamental work on PD controllers is contained in
[1,2] and some typical Lyapunov functions are con-
structed. Generally, in these papers, the Lyapunov func-
tion is strict positive definite, and the coupled term of
angular velocity and attitude quaternion is not consid-
ered, hence there is no constraint on control parameters
but the structure of the controller is also limited. The
structure of PD controllers is simple and the stability is
easy to analyze, but the steady accuracy of PD controllers
is not so good. In order to improve system accuracy, the
integral term is added into PD controllers but the system
stability becomes hard to analyze. In [3] a constrained
optimal PID‐like controller for the satellite attitude stabi-
lization issue is presented. The control parameter is opti-
mized by an augmented cost function; hence the system
performance is improved. A PD‐like controller for satel-
lite attitude control considering disturbance caused by
reaction wheels static friction is designed in [4]. In [5] a
PID attitude controller for satellite formation mainte-
nance is designed and the small perturbation method is
used to analyze the system's stability. In [5–7] PI control-
lers and Lyapunov functions with coupled terms are con-
structed. Considering that the Lyapunov function is
----------- --------------- -------------- --------------- ----------------- -------------- -------------- --------------- -------------
© 2019 Chinese Automatic Control Society and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
Received: 23 April 2018 Revised: 18 September 2018 Accepted: 28 October 2018
DOI: 10.1002/asjc.1999
Asian J Control. 2019;1–18. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/asjc 1
