TR2018-093

Split-Horizon MPC for Coupled Station Keeping, Attitude Control, and Momentum Management of GEO Satellites using Electric Propulsion


    •  Caverly, R., Di Cairano, S., Weiss, A., "Split-Horizon MPC for Coupled Station Keeping, Attitude Control, and Momentum Management of GEO Satellites using Electric Propulsion", American Control Conference (ACC), DOI: 10.23919/​ACC.2018.8431329, June 2018, pp. 652-657.
      BibTeX TR2018-093 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Caverly2018jun,
      • author = {Caverly, Ryan and Di Cairano, Stefano and Weiss, Avishai},
      • title = {Split-Horizon MPC for Coupled Station Keeping, Attitude Control, and Momentum Management of GEO Satellites using Electric Propulsion},
      • booktitle = {American Control Conference (ACC)},
      • year = 2018,
      • pages = {652--657},
      • month = jun,
      • doi = {10.23919/ACC.2018.8431329},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2018-093}
      • }
  • MERL Contacts:
  • Research Area:

    Control

Abstract:

In this paper, a model predictive control (MPC) policy is developed to simultaneously perform station keeping, attitude control, and momentum management of a nadirpointing geostationary satellite equipped with three reaction wheels and four on-off electric thrusters mounted on two boom assemblies attached to the anti-nadir face of the satellite. The MPC policy includes an inner-loop SO(3)-based attitude control law to maintain a nadir-pointing attitude, and an outer loop for station keeping and momentum management. The MPC formulation makes use of two different prediction horizons; a short horizon is used for the states associated with the orbit's inclination and a longer horizon is used for all other states. This split-prediction horizon MPC policy leads to a significant reduction in delta-v compared to a single horizon. The continuous thrust command generated by the MPC policy is quantized as a single on-off pulse every feedback period in such a way that the predicted error in the states induced by quantization is minimized, which reduces the number of onoff pulses compared to other quantization approaches in the literature, including pulse-width modulation.

 

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