Design and Development of a 3DOF ADCS Simulation Testbed with Automatic Balancing Control for CubeSats

Pareja Contreras J.M.; Espinoza-Garcia B.; Montes De Oca R.; Huanca Cayo E. · Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud), I-SMAC 2025 (2025) · DOI: 10.1109/i-smac65734.2025.11597678

Resumen

Design, implementation, and testing of an Attitude Determination and Control System (ADCS) for nano-satellites require a simulated environment capable of replicating the conditions of Low Earth Orbit (LEO), where the absence of friction and gravitational forces is essential. This paper presents the development of a three-degrees-of-freedom air-bearing-based testbed designed at Universidad Católica San Pablo for CubeSat-type nano-satellites. The system features a 45 × 45 ~cm octagonal central structure with two lateral mass-sliding actuators, primarily built from acrylic plates and 3D-printed PLA components, excluding the off-the-shelf air bearing. State estimation for yaw, pitch, and roll is performed using an embedded Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) on a 32-bit microcontroller, which also executes a hybrid control strategy based on a linear PID controller. This approach enables effective convergence to roll and pitch angles of 0.04 and 0.176 degrees, respectively.

Instituciones: Universidad Católica San Pablo