Spillover stabilization of large space structures

Active control of large flexible space structures is typically implemented to control only a few known elastic modes. This paper considers the stabilization of the neglected dynamics of the higher modes of vibration. An attempt is made to design modal controllers with improved spillover stability properties. Two formulations for designing the observer to improve spillover stability with minimum performance loss are proposed. One optimizes the noise statistics used in the design of the Kalman-Bucy Filter (KBF), while the other directly optimizes the the gain matrix of the KBF.