Vehicle attitude control with saturating actuators: Workload balancing and reference adaptation

This paper addresses the problem of vehicle attitude control in the presence of saturating actuators. A novel approach of actuation balancing is proven to be the best way to keep the vehicle off saturation or, at least, to postpone the saturation occurrences as late as possible. In hard conditions, this may be not sufficient to guarantee tracking; hence the joint design of a load-balancing control law and an adapted reference generator is addressed, in order to cope with the lack in the control action and prevent unstable behaviors. On top of the formal results, the method is validated by means of simulations.