On-orbit Gyroscope Bias Compensation to Improve Satellite Attitude Control Performance

Abstract

MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical-system) based gyroscopes are commonly used for satellite's attitude determination and control system in recent years. They are packaged in a small form factor and have lower power consumption. They provide a low-cost solution to the emerging new space industry. MEMS gyroscopes exhibit some time-zero null bias with variation over temperature. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a novel on-orbit gyroscope bias compensation technique based on the model predictive control approach. The proposed method can estimate the gyroscope bias instantly which is not feasible with the typical method. Furthermore, the proposed method has a low computational requirement as compared to the typical EKF (Extended Kalman Filter) method. While the proposed method allows on-orbit compensation of gyroscope bias, the satellite's attitude is required to be nearly at steady state. This limitation will be addressed in detail.