Abstract The problem of magnetic detumbling, also known as magnetic momentum unloading, is considered. The objective is to stabilize a rigid spacecraft angular velocity to zero only through magnetic actuation,… Click to show full abstract
Abstract The problem of magnetic detumbling, also known as magnetic momentum unloading, is considered. The objective is to stabilize a rigid spacecraft angular velocity to zero only through magnetic actuation, i.e. magneto-torquers. We propose a generalized control law that is uniformly, globally exponentially stabilizing (UGES) and show that the celebrated b-dot law is one particular case of this law. Furthermore, we provide an explicit (time-varying) strict Lyapunov function to establish the stability claim.
               
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