Control of space stations

A study is made to develop controllers for the NASA-JSC Triangular Space Station and evaluate their performances to make recommendations for structural design and/or control alternatives. The control system design assumes the rigid body of the Space Station and developes the lumped parameter control system by using the Inverse Optimal Control Theory. In order to evaluate the performance of the control system, a Parameter Estimation algorithm is being developed which will be used in modeling an equivalent but simpler Space Station model. Finally, a scaled version of the Space Station is being built for the purpose of physical experiments to evaluate the control system performance.