Study on attitude control for three degrees of freedom air-bearing spacecraft simulator

Three degrees of freedom air-bearing Spacecraft simulator have been used for spacecraft attitude determination and control hard verification and software development. In this paper, some details about the simulator are described. The equation of motion of the platform and proof masses on which are deduced according to the assumption that the total angular momentum is zero. An important feature of this system is that its linearization is not controllable at any equilibrium, but it is controllable in a nonlinear sense. Strategy based on parameterized sinusoid was applied to the attitude control of the simulator. The results from experiment show good consistency with the numerical simulation results, which provides good evidence that the constructed control model and the control strategy are available for the control of the spacecraft simulator.