Test of attitude control maneuvers with a Satellite Formation Flight testbed

Satellite Formation Flying (SFF) can go beyond mass and volume constraints that today's launchers pose on single satellite missions. However, the high levels of autonomy required by SFF result in stringent requirements on the Guidance Navigation and Control system. These requirements must face up with multitasking problems related to limited on board resources in terms of both computing capacity and control authority. The final aim of the experimental activities presented in this paper is to test optimal control techniques to carry out attitude control maneuvers on the SFF hardware simulator that we are developing at the University of Padova. In particular, we considered both Model Predictive Control (MPC) and quaternion-based Proportional — Integral — Derivative (PID) controllers for two kind of attitude maneuvers: set point reaching maneuvers with a fixed attitude target to be reached, and trajectory tracking maneuvers, where the reference state trajectories are computed using pseudospectral methods.