Antenna pointing system for satellite tracking based on Kalman filtering and model predictive control techniques

The present work proposes a new approach for an antenna pointing system for satellite tracking. Such a system uses the received signal to estimate the beam pointing deviation and then adjusts the antenna pointing. The present work has two contributions. First, the estimation is performed by a Kalman filter based conical scan technique. This technique uses the Kalman filter avoiding the batch estimator and applies a mathematical manipulation avoiding the linearization approximations. Secondly, a control technique based on the model predictive control together with an explicit state feedback solution are obtained in order to reduce the computational burden. Numerical examples illustrate the results.