Attitude tracking control using recursive passivation technique

The main problem addressed is the attitude tracking control of a rigid satellite. A nonlinear feedback control scheme is presented, based on recursive passivation through backstepping. The control structure designed consists of PID-like feedback plus some feedforward terms, which achieves enhancing the tracking performance by compensating for the plant dynamics. Quaternion attitude representation, which is four-parameter and void of singularity when compared with other three-parameter representations, such as Euler angle, is adopted to finish our main control formulation. Simulation results are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control technique