Optimal design method for satellite actuator configurations considering re-configurability

In this paper, a design method for optimal configurations of satellite actuators considering reconfigurability is proposed. The reconfigurability indicators are added in the optimal function to guarantee that faulty systems can achieve the required performances. In the field of optimal designs for spacecraft actuators, there are no general method for judging feasibility of configurations with reaction wheels or thrusters, as well as few proper indicators of reconfigurability performance. To solve these problems, the feasibility judging method is proposed based on the attainable moment space (AMS). Also, some performance indicates are introduced, including the minimum eigenvalue of the controllability Gramm matrix, the minimum radius of attainable moment space (AMS) and the volume of the AMS. Redundancy is the calculated based on the feasibility judging method. What is more, it is noted that the variance of performance indicators of faulty systems can be adopted in the optimal function for reducing the fault effects on reconfigurability. Finally, the configurations of reaction wheels and thrusters are respectively designed based on the proposed method, and it is demonstrated that the designed four-wheel configuration has better output ability compared to the current 3-orthogonal-l-skew wheel configuration.