State-Feedback Control of the SpaceHawk Earth-Based Lunar Hopper
A. Dzaba, E. Mucasey, A. Abraham, E. Schuster and T. Hart
International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems
Atlanta, Georgia, USA, May 28-31, 2013
Abstract
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In this paper we present a control strategy for the
SpaceHawk, an Earth-based model spacecraft designed to navigate
the surface of the moon in a series of "hops." By design, the
nonholonomic dynamics of the SpaceHawk allow the use of fullstate
feedback linearization, which obviates the need for more
involved control techniques such as backstepping. We design two
controllers: an exact feedback-linearization controller for the
position states, and an approximate linearization controller for
the attitude states. The approximate-linearization simplifies the
attitude control task by excluding the highly nonlinear attitude
dynamics from the designed control laws. Simulation results
show both controllers performing well in stability and tracking.