Rafal Wisniewski, Piotr Kulczycki
Rotational Motion Control of a Spacecraft
IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 643-646, 2003

Abstract:
This note describes a systematic procedure for the control synthesis of a rigid spacecraft using the energy shaping method. The geometric concept of a mechanical system in a coordinate-independent form is used to derive a control algorithm for the Euler–Poincaré equations. The main result of this note is a specialization of the method on the unit quaternion group. This note is concluded with the examples of the potential functions and implementation for the three-axis attitude control problem.

Keywords:
attitude control, differential geometric methods, nonlinear control, stability theory.

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