Attitude tracking with adaptive rejection of rate gyro disturbances

The classical attitude control problem for a rigid body is revisited under the assumption that measurements of the angular rates obtained by means of rate gyros are corrupted by harmonic disturbances, a setup of importance in several aerospace applications. The paper extends previous methods developed to compensate bias in angular rate measurements by accounting for a more general class of disturbances, and by allowing uncertainty in the inertial parameters. By resorting to adaptive observers designed on the basis of the internal model principle, it is shown how converging estimates of the angular velocity can be obtained, and used effectively in a passivity-based certainty-equivalence controller yielding global convergence within the chosen parametrization of the group of rotations. Since a persistence of excitation condition is not required for the convergence of the state estimates, only an upper bound on the number of distinct harmonic components of the disturbance is needed for the applicability of the method.