Estimating Friction Parameters in Reaction Wheels for Attitude Control

The ever-increasing use of artificial satellites in both the study of terrestrial and space phenomena demands a search for increasingly accurate and reliable pointing systems. It is common nowadays to employ reaction wheels for attitude control that provide wide range of torque magnitude, high reliability, and little power consumption. However, the bearing friction causes the response of wheel to be nonlinear, which may compromise the stability and precision of the control system as a whole. This work presents a characterization of a typical reaction wheel of 0.65 Nms maximum angular momentum storage, in order to estimate their friction parameters. It used a friction model that takes into account the Coulomb friction, viscous friction, and static friction, according to the Stribeck formulation. The parameters were estimated by means of a nonlinear batch least squares procedure, from data raised experimentally. The results have shown wide agreement with the experimental data and were also close to a deterministic model, previously obtained for this wheel. This model was then employed in a Dynamic Model Compensator (DMC) control, which successfully reduced the attitude steady state error of an instrumented one-axis air-bearing table.