Inertia-Free Spacecraft Attitude Control Using Reaction Wheels

This paper extends the continuous inertia-free control law for spacecraft attitude tracking derived in prior work to the case of three axisymmetric reaction wheels. The 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 unknown spacecraft principal axes. Simulation results for slew and spin maneuvers are presented with torque and momentum saturation.