Robust control of a spin-stabilized spacecraft via a 1DoF gimbaled-thruster and two reaction wheels

In impulsive orbital maneuvers, thrust vector misalignment from the center of mass (C.M) results in a large disturbance torque. In this paper a thrusting maneuver system is proposed and studied which is based on the combination of a one degree of freedom (1DoF) gimbaled-thruster, two reaction wheels (RWs) and spin-stabilization. The main goals are disturbance rejection and thrust vector stabilization without using reaction control systems (RCS). The nonlinear two-body dynamics of the proposed system is formulated. The controller design is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem where the peak-value of the control input and H∞ performance are the cost functions. Based on the peak-to-peak gain minimization, the accuracy of the linearized model can be guaranteed. The optimization results give many optimal controllers which are acceptable for a thrusting maneuver. The simulation results illustrate the applicability of the proposed method in presence of the sampling effects of the control inputs.