DESIGN OF AN ATTITUDE CONTROL SYSTEM FOR A CUBESAT NANOSATELLITE

Abstract

The proposed research was carried out to design an appropriate non-linear controller for a non-linear time-variant model of a CubeSat nanosatellite. It is intended to experiment with a controller such as model predictive controller (MPC) to evaluate its performances and find out if it suits to the application. A complex simulation environment that includes spacecraft dynamics and environmental models was used to build the control law for the CubeSat's attitude control system. Tracking a group of state references that conform to a predetermined observation trajectory is the controller's goal. The controller was implemented in MATLAB simulation environment using ACADO toolkit