Cold gas attitude control systems

This paper presents the development of a cold gas attitude control system. The system consists of a body frame with sensors, gas tank and solenoid valves with thruster nozzles. The on-off thrust actuators enable the system to rotate in the yaw direction. The objective of this control system is to bring the system to the desired attitude (orientation) starting from its initial angular position. The detailed dynamic model of the system is derived using the Euler-Lagrange method to facilitate controller design. Based on a linearized model, a bang-bang control scheme is used to do attitude control. The designed control law is implemented on a digital signal processor (DSP). Finally, the simulation and experimental results are given to validate the effectiveness of the control scheme.