Attitude control of a CubeSat in a Circular Orbit using Reaction Wheels

This paper presents the attitude control of a CubeSat in a low earth Circular Orbit using Reaction Wheels. Although reaction wheels have certain shortcomings, they provide a fast and accurate approach to achieving attitude stabilization. The objective of this paper is to investigate the performance of reaction wheels for a CubeSat Attitude Control System (ACS). This investigation is achieved via a proposed control law (set point regulator) based on the well known (model independent) PD controller. To validate this objective, two cases for the attitude manoeuvre were considered using SCILAB application software. The numerical computation of the ACS thus helps to provide proper theoretical analysis of the observed results which are provided in this paper to demonstrate the efficiency of the control method.