Attitude Control of an Omni-Directional Aerial Vehicle for Simulating Free-Flyer In-Space Assembly Operations

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-0358.vid The omnicopter has been identified as a small unmanned aerial vehicle capable of emulating small satellite motion during in-space assembly (ISA) operations because it has decoupled translational and rotational motion. The goal of this research is to determine which control scheme yields the best attitude trajectory tracking. Simulations in Simulink are used to compare a PI/Feedback linearization controller (PI/FL), a backstepping controller, an adaptive backstepping controller, and an augmented model reference adaptive control based controller (aMRAC). The controllers are tested by increasing the system moment of inertia and introducing random disturbance torques as they execute trajectories representative of free-flyer ISA operations. The PI/FL and aMRAC controllers outperform both backstepping controllers, consistently yielding smaller attitude tracking errors.