Rigid Body Attitude Control With Delayed Attitude Measurement

Time delay in the evaluation of the attitude of a rigid body can significantly hinder the performance of the attitude control system. In this brief, we propose a dynamically smooth control law that guarantees asymptotic convergence of the rigid body attitude and angular velocity to their desired values in the presence of delayed attitude measurement. We assume that the moment-of-inertia matrix of the body is unknown. The control law includes a matrix gain that is computed by solving a delay-dependent and time-varying matrix differential equation. It is shown that the solvability of the matrix differential equation depends on a uniform controllability condition, which can be verified a priori and based on available information on reference vectors. Finally, the simulation example illustrates the performance of the proposed controller in the case of a satellite system and in comparison with another existing controller.