A projection-based controller for fast spacecraft detumbling using magnetic actuation

Magnetic control has been used for decades for spacecraft detumbling, i.e., to bring a spacecraft to a final condition with a sufficiently small angular momentum after separation from the launcher. This task is typically achieved by controllers based on the so-called b-dot principle, which stands out thanks to its simplicity, reliability and ease of on-board implementation. In this paper, we first review existing control methods and study their convergence properties with tools borrowed from general averaging theory, which allows addressing in an accurate manner the time-varying nature of magnetic actuation. Then, some effort is devoted to showing the performance limitations of existing controllers for which increasing the gain too much deteriorates the convergence rate. To overcome this issue, a novel projection-based control law with a state-dependent time-varying gain is presented. By means of Lyapunov arguments for non-autonomous systems, we prove that the proposed controller guarantees that the spacecraft angular momentum converges exponentially fast to zero for all initial conditions, robustly with respect to sufficiently small uncertainties in the inertia matrix, and that the closed-loop solutions are globally uniformly ultimately bounded in the presence of exogenous bounded disturbances. Several numerical simulations have been carried out by referring to realistic detumbling scenarios to show the performance improvement with respect to existing controllers.