A new attitude control design approach for flexible satellites

This paper presents a new approach for Attitude Control System (ACS) design for flexible satellites. This approach is based on fixed-structure H∞ design weighting the acceleration sensitivity function. This H∞ scheme was previously developed for rigid mechanical system and is reconsidered here for flexible mechanical system taking into account the sub-structure of the model. It allows to obtain a robust controller in the case where the desired bandwidth is very stringent (the desired attitude servo-loop bandwidth is close or beyond the first flexible mode). The proposed approach is illustrated on a telecommunication satellite and compared with classical proportional derivative (PD) control and full order H∞ controller.