Fault diagnosis and control reconfiguration for satellite reaction wheels

This paper presents preliminary results regarding the development of a supervision scheme for the attitude control system of a nonlinear satellite model. The main issue concerns the handling of faults affecting the reaction wheels, i.e. how to detect and isolate faults, and how to prevent propagation into failures with potential mission loss as a consequence. Thus, this work investigates the design of a scheme for fault detection, isolation and control reconfiguration applied to the reaction wheels of a spacecraft attitude control, based on the satellite model. As the study focuses on a general satellite nonlinear model, where aerodynamic and gravitational disturbances, as well as measurement errors are present, the robustness of the suggested strategy is achieved by exploiting an explicit disturbance decoupling method. The results obtained demonstrate how the proposed methodology can constitute a successful approach for real application in future spacecraft.