Backstepping Control of Magnetically Suspended Double-Gimbal Control Moment Gyroscope

This paper presents the theoretical design and the software validation of a backstepping based controller to achieve the high-precision control of a magnetically suspended double gimbal control moment gyro with strong channel cross-coupling. Starting from the 6-DOF nonlinear dynamics of the gyroscopic system, the design of the controller aims to enhance the system robustness, to handle the channel interferences, and to ensure a high accuracy convergence of the states to their desired values. The stability of the new control architecture is proved using the Lyapunov theory. The obtained results show that the backstepping based controller improves the angular speed precision of the magnetically suspended spinning rotor and of the two gimbal servo systems.