Satellite Attitude Fault Tolerant Control with Aerodynamic Disturbance Decoupling

This paper presents an Attitude Active Fault Tolerant Control for satellite. The proposed fault tolerant controller is constituted by two main parts: a nominal controller, designed assuming that the system is healthy, and a fault diagnosis module which is in charge of detecting, isolating and estimating the fault affecting the system. The fault diagnosis module is designed by using the NonLinear Geometric Approach which allows for the design of detection residuals and estimation filter decoupled from the aerodynamic disturbance which represents the main uncertainty in low Earth orbits. The simulation results show the benefits, in terms of attitude tracking accuracy, arising when adopting the proposed method.