Matlab GUI-Based Simulation Platform Design of Flexible Satellite

Attitude Control and Vibration Suppression

Jiawei Tao1 , Tao Zhang1 , Wei Ren2 , Guanchao Han1
1. Department of Automation, School of Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084
E-mail: tjw13@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn
2. Space Center, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 10008
E-mail: rw12@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn

Abstract: With the development of aerospace mission, more and more satellites adopt large scale flexible structures.
However, rigid body motion of flexible spacecraft is strongly coupled with elastic vibration of flexible structure, which
may lead to oscillation and overshoot of satellite attitude, even instability. The conventional method, PID plus structural
filter, is an effective tool to suppress vibrations of solar panels. The typical features of this control schemes are that
accurate panel vibration frequency is required, and adjacent vibration frequency should not be close to each other. Unfor-
tunately, these requirements are not always satisfied in reality. With a view to tackling the above limitations, H∞ robust
controller for a flexible satellite model with parametric uncertainties of solar panel vibration frequency was adopted in
this paper, and numerical simulations show that the robust controller has obvious advantages over other two methods.
In addition, the high control accuracy and short transition time prove that the robust controller based on the principle
of weighted mixed-sensitivity H∞ optimization can suppress the vibration accurately. At the same time, Graphic User
Interface (GUI) was used to design a simulation platform, which is served as the test bed for the robust controller de-
sign for flexible satellite, providing good interaction and extensibility. Overall, the numerical simulation results, based
on the well-established platform, clearly establish the superiority and robustness of the robust controller in suppressing
the flexible vibration, even though the vibration frequency perturbation of flexible structure happens. It is illustrated
sufficiently that the established platform is helpful to the controller design and analysis, and the application of weighted
mixed-sensitivity H∞ optimization to the attitude controller design of flexible satellite can satisfy the control requirement
of vibration suppression.
Key Words: Flexible Satellite, Attitude Control, Mixed Sensitivity, Simulation platform

1 INTRODUCTION [5], active structural control of the Middeck Active Con-

The employment of flexible structures in the spatial area
has been growing up. Examples of missions that involve
flexible space structures are the International Space Station
(ISS) [1], the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO)[2], the
Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS),
the Hubble Space Telescope, and so on and so forth. Flex-
ible systems offer several advantages compared with the
rigid system. Some advantages include relatively smaller
actuators, lower overall mass, faster response, lower ener-
gy consumption, in general, and lower cost [3]. With the
study of the Attitude Control System (ACS) of space struc-
tures with flexible antennas and/or panel and robotic ma-
nipulators, one becomes more complex when the dimen-
sions of such structures increase due to necessity to con-
sider a bigger number of vibration modes in its model in
order to improve the model fidelity [4]. Consequently, the
rapid complexity increase of systems and processes to be
controlled has stimulated the development of sophisticated
analysis and design methods of attitude and vibration sup-
pression.
Some on-orbit tests, based on vibration suppression and at-
titude control of large space structures, have been carried
out, such as the Hubble Space Telescope Pointing Control
trol Experiment (MACE) [6], a United States Space Shuttle
flight experiment which flew on STS-67 And on-orbit con-
trol experiments of Japan’s Engineering Test Satellite VI
(ETS-VI) [7].The biggest challenge is to control the satel-
lite attitude and suppress the flexible structure vibration in
the presence of unmodeled dynamics, model parameter-
s uncertainty ,such as natural frequency of flexible struc-
tures, and external disturbance torque. Unmodeled dynam-
ics can be described as unstructured uncertainties. In ad-
dition, many characteristic parameters of the flexible struc-
ture can only be obtained according to theoretical calcu-
lations [8]. There is a difference between actual on-orbit
parameter and available one. To tackle the situations men-
tioned above, attitude control problem was converted into
an H∞ mixed sensitivity problem through choosing suit-
able weighting functions. A controller with the robust sta-
bility for the attitude control system is developed. At the
same time, based on Matlab GUI, a simulation platform for
flexible satellite attitude control and vibration suppression
is constructed, which is served as the test bed of satellite
attitude control and vibration suppression algorithms.

978-1-4799-7016-2/15/$31.00 2015
c IEEE 1552
 Simulation Platform

activated interface main interactive interface

main basic extension

Boot Exit Help
function function interface

Robust Stability Actuator Frequency performance Load save Parameters

design analysis selection analysis analysis data data setting

Figure 1: Block Diagram of Simulation Platform

Figure 2: Interactive Interface
2 STRUCTURE OF THE SIMULATION PLAT-
FORM
the phase margin, gain margin and the cutoff frequency un-
der different controller parameters through the bode dia-
gram and Nichols chart from the result output window of
the established platform. Precision analysis module is not
only used to compute attitude measurement accuracy, atti-
tude pointing accuracy and attitude stability index accord-
ing to different installation and types of the selected sen-
sor and actuator from the model library, as shown in Fig.3,
as well as different controller parameters, but also used to
give optimal control system bandwidth, which can greatly
improve the accuracy and efficiency of controller design.
All the result of design and analysis will be graphically dis-
played and stored in the established platform. The platform
has several advantages as follows.
(1) Good MMI(Man-machine interaction) makes it conve-
nient to carry out simulation under various parameters and
conditions.
(2) Based on given interface, the simulation platform pro-
vides a certain degree of syntactic flexibility and extensi-
bility to dynamically load new algorithm in the form of M-
files and C or C++ source code.

2.1 Overall Structure Design 3 MODEL OF FLEXIBLE SATELLITE

To facilitate subsequent GUI design, the overall structure of
the simulation platform should be completed first by means
of the hierarchical top-down design methodology. To be-
gin with, the activated interface is constructed, followed
by the main interactive interface, the most important part
of the platform.Then detail design for the sub-interfaces of
the main interactive interface is provided at last. The block
diagram of simulation platform is shown in Fig.1
2.2 Main Function Modules
The main functional area of the interactive interface con-
sists of five units: robust design, stability analysis, p-
neumatic frequency analysis and performance analysis, as
shown in Fig.2. Robust design is directed primarily to-
wards developing proper robust control law that guarantees
stability in the presence of model uncertainty and external
disturbance. The main function of stability analysis unit
is adopting classical stability analysis method to determine
The hybrid-coordinate model was used for the control anal-
ysis, design, and digital simulations. The linearized atti-
tude dynamics of a flexible spacecraft can be modeled as
formula (1) and (2). The rigid body is
Jb θ̈b + θ̇b × Jb θ̇b + Fs η̈s = Tc + Td (1)
And the solar arrays are
η̈s + 2ξs Ωs η̇s + Ω2s ηs + FsT ω̇b = 0 (2)
where Jb ∈ R3×3 is the entire inertia matrix of the space-
craft which is positive definite symmetric, ηs ∈ Rn×1 is the
modal coordinate vector of the flexible solar arrays, where
n is the number of flexible modes considered, Fs ∈ Rn×3
is the rigid-elastic coupling matrix between rigid and flexi-
ble dynamics (function of solar array slew angle), θb is the
attitude angle vector. ξs is the solar panel vibration modal

2015 27th Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC) 1553

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Z ]
* ]
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X \ :
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:
. U \
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Figure 4: Generalized plant  

Figure 5: Plant with weighting functions for H∞ design

damping ratio matrix. Ωs is the solar panel modal frequen-
cy matrix. Tc ∈ R3×1 is the control torque vector acting on
the rigid body of the spacecraft, and Td ∈ R3×1 is the ex-
function cost of mixed sensibility is given as formula (3)
ternal disturbance torque vector, the upper bound of which
is Td max . There is coupling relationship between rigid ⎡ ⎤ −1
body and flexible solar planels of the spacecraft according W1 S S = (I + GK)
to formula (1) and (2). The angular acceleration will affec- Ty1 u1 = ⎣ W1 R ⎦ , R = K(I + GK)
−1
(3)
W1 T −1
t the flexible modes and deform the appendages. And the T = GK(I + GK)
vibration velocity and acceleration of flexible modes will
affect the attitude of rigid body simultaneously. where S is called sensibility, T is complementary sensi-
tivity function. The transfer function from w to z1 is the
weighted sensitivity function W1 S, which characterizes the
4 H-INFINITY CONTROL OF FLEXIBLE performance objective of good tracking, while the trans-
SATELLITE fer function from w to z2 is the complementary sensitivity
function T whose minimization ensures low control gains
4.1 H-Infinity Mixed Sensitivity Problem at high frequencies, and the transfer function from w to z3
H-Infinity control method had a significant impact on the is KS, which measures the control effort. It is also used
development of control systems. Nowadays the technique to impose the constraints on the control input, for example,
has become fully grown and it is applied on industrial prob- the saturation limits [3].
lems [9]. The control problem can be generally defined by
4.2 Robust Controller Design
the configuration of Fig.4. The plan is a given system with
two inputs and two outputs. It is often referred to as the Flexible satellite is a complex system with highly nonlin-
generalized plant. The signal w is an external input and earity, strongly coupling, and uncertainty, as shown in for-
represents driving signals that generate disturbances, mea- mula (1) and (2). Considering the fact that pitch channel
surement noise, and reference inputs. The signal u is the is decoupled from yaw and roll ones, following controller
control input. The output z has the meaning of control er- design is confined to pitch chanel to illustrate the design
ror and ideally should be zero. The output y is the observed process. The control model of pitch channel is shown in
output and is available for feedback [3]. The augmented formula (4).
plant is formed by accounting for the weighting function-
s W1 , W2 , W3 , as shown in Fig.5. In order to reach the θ (s) 1
=   (4)
control objectives, the outputs were chosen to be transfer Ty (s) 
N
ki s2
weight functions:z1 = W1 e, z2 = W2 u, z3 = W3 y. The Jy s2 1 − s2 +2ξ 2
i Ωi s+Ωi
i=1

1554 2015 27th Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC)

 7F  T ty function and suppress the disturbance at low frequency
- \ V [10].
 1
NL V  cs + (b + ac)
¦V  [L :L V  :L
W1 (s) = (6)
s+a

L 

Figure 6: Block diagram of the pitch channel model where a > 0, b > 0, c > 0. ω1 = a and KD = (b + ac)/a
are the first corner frequency and low-frequency gain of the
low-pass W1 respectively. Meanwhile, the second corner
7G frequency and high-frequency gain of W1 are (b + ac)/c
T UHI

T
and KF = c.To improve the system performance, there are
 

 


 
* some criteria of selection of above undetermined parame-
 

 suppress disturbance and error tracking, should be as
Figure 7: Block diagram of the pitch channel control circuit
δi2
where mode gain ki = Jy is the square of coupling coeffi-
cient divided by the entire inertia matrix of the spacecraft.
The block diagram of the pitch channel model is shown in
Fig.6. From that, we can clearly see that the flexible struc-
tures affect the entire satellite system in the form of posi-
tive feedback. If the coupling coefficient δi is equal to 0,
the plant is reduced to be a rigid satellite.
The complex flexible structure can be converted to mul-
tiplicative uncertainty representations, which can be con-
sidered as multiplicative perturbation to rigid satellite, as
shown in Fig.7 The pitch channel model in Fig.6 is equiv-
alently transformed to be a nominal model G0 and multi-
plicative uncertainty ΔG, where G0 and ΔG can be easily
defined as shown in following formula (5).

N
1 s2 +2ξi Ωi s+Ω2i
i=1
G0 = , ΔG =
J y s2 N
1−
i=1
Thus, the original model of rigid-flexible satellite is divid-
ed into two parts, nominal rigid model and multiplicative
uncertainty. The simplified transfer functions of the con-
trol moment gyroscope and sensor are regarded as constant
scale factor in the subsequent simulation.
4.3 Selection of the Weighting Functions
Table 1 gives the nominal parameters of the first four modes
vibration frequency. W1 and W2 determine the shapes
of sensitivity S and complementary sensitivity T . Typ-
ically, W1 should be chosen to be small in the desired
control bandwidth to achieve good disturbance attenuation
(i.e.,performance). Normally, formula (8) gives a simple
choice of weighting function W1 to reduce the sensitivi-
Table 1: First four modes’s vibration frequency
Vibration Mode Frequency(Ωi )
1 0.469
2 4.221
3 11.725
4 22.981
2015 27th Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC)
ters in formula (8)as follows [10].
'*
1) Low-frequency gain KD , representing the ability to
large as possible.
2) The bandwidth of disturbance suppressing and error
tracking is characterized by ω1 = a, which should be
as large as possible too.
3) High-frequency gain KF = c, reflecting the peak value
of system sensitivity function, which should be chosen
to be a big value.
In general, high-frequency gain of We , c, should be smaller
than 1 and low-frequency gain, KD = (b + ac)/a, should
be far bigger than 1. Thus, the above requirements can be
simplified to be that b/a, a and c should be chosen as big
values. As a first selection, weighting function of system
performance is selected as formula (8)
0.1s + 100
W1 (s) = (7)
s+1
ki s2 Moreover, to limit the controller output [8], W2 = 1×10−7 .
The frequency characteristics of all multiplicative uncer-
(5)
k i s2
tainty should be covered by high-pass weighting function
s2 +2ξi Ωi s+Ω2i W2 , which is given by
130s2
W3 (s) = (8)
s2 +s+1
Fig.8 gives the amplitude-frequency characteristics of mul-
tiplicative uncertainty without parameters perturbation and
W3 .
To reduce conservativeness of model, weighting function
W3 should not deviate too much from actual perturbation,
as is shown in Fig.8. In this paper, the unmodeled dynamic-
s is considered as multiplicative perturbation to rigid satel-
lite. The flexible mode frequency is assumed to vary with-
in the range from −15% to 15%. The amplitude-frequency
characteristics of multiplicative uncertainty with parame-
ters perturbation and W3 are shown in Fig.9.
According to Fig.8 and Fig.9, it is obvious that amplitude-
frequency characteristics of W3 cover the whole domain
of multiplicative uncertainty except several peak points in
Coupling Coefficient(δi ) order to reduce model conservativeness.
76.2 However, robust control method can not be applied to this
-5.75 flexible structure control problem due to the poles of nom-
4.008 inal model existing on the imaginary axis. In this case,
-0.574 the bilinear transform s = γz+βαz+δ
(also known as Tustin’s
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plicative uncertainty without parameters perturbation and Figure 10: The pitch angle of pid,pid+notch filter, and H∞
W3
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Figure 11: The pitch angle of pid,pid+notch filter, and H∞
Figure 9: Amplitude-frequency characteristics of multi-
plicative uncertainty with parameters perturbation and W3
The adjusted parameters of PID is KP = 68, KI = 0,
KD = 908. For this fourth-order flexible structure mod-
method) is used, through which the poles on the imaginary
el, the numerical simulations are divided into two subcat-
axis can be moved away. Then, based on the new plant, a
egories to assess the performance of the robust controller.
controller, G (z), is designed by employing above H∞ op-
First the effectiveness of the robust controller for the nom-
timization method. By applying the inverse bilinear trans-
inal case is presented. Then the performance of the vibra-
formation to specifications of G (z), the robust controller
tion frequency perturbations case is also presented to verify
of original flexible satellite model is developed. Finally,
the control ability of the robust controller to suppress the
the resulting robust controller after model reduction is giv-
flexible vibration of the solar panel. The simulation results
en by
of the nominal case are depicted in Fig.10. According to
that, it is obvious that the robust controller based on H∞
3 2
2.595e08s + 5.535e08s + 1.915e08s + 1.804e07 mixed sensitivity can enhance the control performance of
K(s) = effectively by comparing with conventional PID controller
s4 + 525.7s3 + 1.386e04s2 + 8468s + 1922
(9) and PID plus notch filter.
Fig.11 shows the result of vibration frequency perturba-
5 SIMULATION RESULTS tions case, where the flexible mode frequency decreases
Numerical simulations of the proposed control scheme for by 15%, from which it seems clear that the trajectory of
flexible satellite are done here. The parameters of the satel- the pitch angle of PID plus notch filter begins to oscillate
lite refer to Table 1 [11]. The flexible modes have nominal during the time between 10s and 50s.
passive damping ratios of ξ1 = ξ2 = ξ3 = ξ4 = 0.01. The reason for this phenomenon is that the new flexible

1556 2015 27th Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC)

mode can not be compensated any more by the original
structure filter due to the variation of the natural frequen-
cy of flexible structures, so that performance of PID plus
structure filter is influenced by the parameters variation. It
is apparent from Fig.11 that control accuracy of the H∞ is
higher than that of PID plus filter.
The full trajectories are shown in Fig.10 and Fig.11 for the
three control methodologies, and the enlarged trajectories
during the time between 0s and 5s are also shown in the
top right position of these figures, which are useful to un-
derstand the control effect of the robust controller in the
initial stage. As shown in the figures above, the pitch angle
of the PID and PID plus notch filter generate fluctuations
when the serious variation of the vibration frequency take
place.
Overall, we can summarize that robust controller has obvi-
ous advantages in the nominal case or even in the severe pa-
rameters perturbations case. In contrast, PID and PID plus
structure filter generate fluctuations when serious variation
of the vibration frequency take place.
6 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, an robust controller based on the weighted
mixed-sensitivity H∞ optimization is applied to the atti-
tude control and vibration suppression of flexible satellite.
The determination of the weighting functions W1 ,W2 and
W3 is discussed. In addition, the model structure of flexi-
ble satellite is investigated and converted to multiplicative
uncertainty description. All of these analyses provide the
basis for robust controller design. Finally, in order to assess
the performance of the proposed strategies comprehensive,
two scenarios of the nominal case and the severe parame-
ters perturbations case are considered. Numerical simula-
tions show that all of the PID, PID plus structure filter and
robust controller were able to stabilized the attitude, but ro-
bust controller has obvious advantages over the other two
methods. More specifically, the PID plus structure filter
outweigh the PID more or less. The high control accuracy
and short transition time proved that the robust controller
based on the principle of weighted mixed-sensitivity H∞
2015 27th Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC)
optimization can suppress the vibration accurately.
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