Ricerc@Sapienza

Nowadays, the space structures control domain is still a very active research field, due to the continuous development of modern space activities and the consequent evolution of mission needs and requirements. High precision pointing control for flexible spacecraft with large appendages requires special care, especially as currently satellites are often required to perform increasingly fast slew manoeuvres for Earth Observation (EO) purposes. Indeed, even mild rigid body/flexible dynamics interactions can affect and deteriorate the pointing and stability performance, if a proper control strategy is not adopted. In the last decades, several techniques have been considered to address the Control/Structure Interaction (CSI) issue, such as traditional controllers coupled with filters and frequency separation design strategies. However, standard methods still present several limits and drawbacks, such as computational tuning burdens and attitude actuation limits. In this research, an alternative approach is considered by investigating an Active Vibration Control (AVC) strategy. In detail, the foreseen impact of this research on the current state-of-the-art is twofold. On one hand, it will lead to the synthesis and experimental testing of an advanced fully-integrated attitude/vibration control system, coupled with smart Failure Detection, Identification and Recovery (FDIR) on a scaled laboratory floating platform, leading to a TRL4 level for the proposed technology. Also, a promising yet still scarcely diffused vibration suppression device will be implemented in the control loop, namely an Offset Piezoelectric Stack Actuator (OPSA). Therefore, in this project, the testing of an OPSA-based controller performance for damping out elastic vibration during an attitude manoeuvre will be, to the proponent's best knowledge, the first attempt on a laboratory floating platform available in literature.