Envelope oriented singularity robust steering law of control moment gyros for spacecraft attitude maneuver

The problem of steering pyramid control moment gyro (CMG) cluster for fast spacecraft attitude maneuver along eigenaxis is investigated. A novel steering law is proposed to continuously attempt to reduce the difference between the current gimbal angle and the desired one corresponding to the angular momentum envelop of the CMG cluster. The proposed steering law can be decomposed into two parts: the first one is a singularity robust term to keep maneuverability and produce control torque, and the other is a null motion term to rearrange the gimbal angles toward momentum envelope. By involving this steering law, it is expected to possess both rapid angular momentum exchange and singularity avoidance ability. In addition, by introducing a new limit vector on attitude error, classical cascade-saturation control algorithm is revised to guarantee spacecraft eigenaxis rotation. Both open-loop steering law test and closed-loop attitude maneuver simulations are performed to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed methods.