Hardware-in-the-loop simulation for Attitude Control of a Suborbital Module using Cold Gas Thrusters

This paper is concerned with design, develop and implementation of a quaternion based attitude control system for a rigid suborbital module which using cold gas thrusters over a short-duration mission. The quaternion controller produces a demand torque, and a pulse-width pulse-frequency (PWPF) modulator determines the necessary thruster fire signals. The effect of disturbances on module attitude has been investigated and the most significant found to be due to misalignment of thrusters effects. The system concept has been evaluated through modeling in Simulink and a rapid prototype hardware-in-the-loop platform and has been found to meet the requirements laid out for a typical module mission.The satisfactory performance of the controllers was illustrated through both numerical and hardware-in-the-loop simulations, where a system of twelve thrusters and load sensors were implemented in the hardware and disturbance effects such as thrust misalignment and sensor noise were studied. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed control method for agile attitude maneuvers of suborbital modules. The results of the HIL simulation were also used for tuning the parameters of the module’s numerical simulation that is to be used for error budgeting analyses.