A sliding manifold approach to satellite attitude control

A sliding manifold based control strategy is proposed for the attitude control of a satellite. By using the theory of singular perturbation a PD feedback control is designed. It exhibits robustness properties with respect to environmental disturbances and plant parametric uncertainties. The resulting control signal remains, after a fast transient, in a neighbourhood of the well-defined equivalent control. Then the control can take into account bounds on the available control signals and avoid the peaking phenomenon of high gain systems. Finally the proposed procedure is applied to the CARINA capsule, and simulations are performed by using the ESA-MIDAS dynamic simulator in presence of environmental disturbances and corrupted Earth-magnetic field measures.