Verification of a hybrid control approach for spacecraft attitude stabilization through hardware-in-the-loop simulation

State dependent Riccati equation (SDRE) control technique has been widely used in the control society. Although it solves nonlinear optimal control problems, which minimizes state error and control efforts simultaneously, it has drawbacks when it is to be applied to the real time systems in that it requires much computational efforts. So the real time system whose computational ability is limited (for example, satellites) cannot afford to use SDRE controller. To solve this problem, a hybrid controller which is based on MSDRE (Modified SDRE) and ANFIS (Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System) has been proposed by Abdelrahman et al. (2010). We propose a hybrid controller based on SDRE and ANFIS, and apply the hybrid controller to the hardware attitude simulator to perform a HIL (Hardware-In-the-Loop) simulation. Through HIL simulation, it is demonstrated that the hybrid controller satisfies the control requirement and the computation load is reduced significantly. In addition, the effects of statistical properties of the ANFIS training data to the performance of the ANFIS controller have been analyzed.