Proportional-Derivative-Acceleration Feedback Controller Design for Single Axis Attitude Control of Rigid Spacecraft with Flexible Appendages

This study designs and analyzes a new type of controller that helps improve the performance of single axis attitude control of flexible appendages attached to a rigid spacecraft. Conventionally, PID with position feedback was used to control single axis attitude manoeuvre of flexible appendages on a spacecraft but designing a PID to control a higher order system is a limited strategy. Also, PID controllers are inherently unstable for third order systems and higher as will be demonstrated later. Thus, acceleration feedback is included in the design to demonstrate a more stable way of designing controllers for these systems and it is called PDA (Proportional Derivative Acceleration) controller. The controller is first designed using a root locus method and then applied to a simulated third order system om MATLAB. Then a higher order system model (rigid body with flexible appendage) is created on SIMULINK and the controller is applied to it. Finally, an experiment is performed and demonstrated to show the practical implementation of the control design.