Nanosatellite Air Bearing Tests of Fault-Tolerant Sliding-Mode Attitude Control with Unscented Kalman Filter

Abstract

This paper documents the development and testing of a fault tolerant sliding mode attitude control algorithm for a nanosatellite with reaction wheel control actuation.A locally asymptotically stable adaptive fuzzy first order sliding mode controller is used to solve the local attitude control tracking problem.An adaptive unscented Kalman filter with a reduced sigma set is proposed to improve estimation of nanosatellite attitude on an air bearing test system and and compared in simulation with a symmetric adaptive unscented Kalman filter.Tests include a comparison with PID, second order and third order sliding mode controllers, and the results validate the performance of the proposed adaptive fuzzy sliding mode controller and unscented Kalman filter on embedded nanosatellite hardware in the presence of noise and faults.