Inertia-free spacecraft attitude control with reaction-wheel actuation

We extend the inertia-free continuous control law for spacecraft attitude tracking derived in prior work to the case of three axially symmetric reaction wheels. These wheels are assumed to be mounted in a known and linearly independent, but not necessarily orthogonal, configuration with an arbitrary and unknown orientation relative to the spacecraft principal axes. We analyze the stability and performance of the closed-loop system under scale-factor sensor and actuator uncertainty. Finally, we present a numerical study of the algorithm's robustness to sensor noise.