Attitude control of a satellite with redundant thrusters

Redundant thrusters are generally used for a reliable attitude control system. Also, redundant thrusters yield a better performance if they are used appropriately. In this paper, the authors propose an efficient redundancy management algorithm to reduce the fuel consumption. The algorithm is based on a linear programming problem which is a constrained optimization problem. For the algorithm, a cost function is defined as a quantity related to the fuel consumption for a maneuver. The independent variables are the thrusters' on-times which are control input variables of a satellite dynamic model. The advantage of the proposed method is verified by numerical examples. The examples show that the proposed method consumes less fuel than an existing method for a given maneuvering command. A sub-optimal algorithm is also discussed for an onboard computation. The proposed algorithm is applied to two maneuvers: move-to-rest and rest-to-rest. This is verified by a numerical simulation.