Attitude drift for systems with partial internal damping

The use of feedback for the asymptotic stabilization of uniform motion introduces partial internal damping in the system dynamics. For such systems the dynamics converge to relative equilibria of the undamped system. In converging to these relative equilibria the dissipation introduced by the control law does work on the system and moves the spatially referenced angular momentum vector. In this paper we compare attitude drift for the closed loop dynamics with the undamped case and estimate the displacement of the spatially referenced angular momentum vector. The results are illustrated by several numerical examples.<>