RESEARCH OF CONTROL MOMENTUM GYROS FOR MICRO-SATELLITES AND 3-DOF ATTITUDE DYNAMICS SIMULATOR EXPERIMENTS

Abstract

“Agility” is one of keywords for advanced missions of next generation satellites. In particular, agile attitude maneuver is one of advantages of micro-satellites. For the agile maneuver missions, Control Moment Gyros (CMGs) will meet the necessary requirements. CMG is a nice torque amplification device because a small gimbal torque input produces a large torque output. However, CMG has some difficulties in designing and control algorithm, because the amplitude of the output torque drastically changes with the gimbal angle configurations or output torque direction. In the paper, a simplified method to calculate appropriate output torque is introduced. In the method, two parameters are used: manipulability and mean maximum angular. The proposed method is experimentally evaluated using a test model of CMG developed by the authors. A 3-DOF attitude dynamics simulator is also developed for the experiment. The authors explain the experimental models of the pyramid cluster CMG and the attitude simulator, and discuss the results of the functional evaluation experiments.