Singularity avoidance of control moment gyros by one-step ahead singularity index

Abstract

A steering law of control moment gyros for spacecraft attitude control by using one-step ahead singularity index is addressed in this paper. In some recent studies, the null motion approaches or singularity robustness steering laws have been extensively investigated to avoid singular configurations for a control momentum gyro (CMG) cluster. As a novel approach different from them, the proposed approach is based on optimization technique by minimizing the one-step ahead singularity index. Modified approaches are also presented in this paper. The proposed one-step prediction method ultimately gives an optimized solution of gimbal rates with advanced ability to avoid a singularity. A singularity index for reliable computation of a gradient vector is also introduced. Finally, performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by numerical simulations. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.