Adaptive control schemes applied to a control moment gyroscope of 2 degrees of freedom

Control of underactuated mechanical systems has been an important trend in mechatronics and nonlinear systems. Typical examples are the Furuta pendulum and inertia wheel pendulum. On the other hand, gyroscopes are important in aerial and space systems. In this paper, a two-degree of freedom underactuated control moment gyroscope (CMG) is studied. This system is highly coupled of one joint to the another and is difficult to control, which make it an important benchmark system. The problem addressed in this paper is to achieve robust motion control of the underactuated CMG. Firstly, a trajectory tracking controller is developed by using the feedback linearization technique. Secondly, two new adaptive algorithms are introduced, which correspond to an adaptive neural network algorithm and an adaptive model regressor scheme. A real–time experimental comparison is carried out among a linear PD control law, a cascade PID-PID controller and the introduced schemes. The real-time experimental study validates the introduced theory, where the performance of the controllers is evaluated with and without a periodic disturbance at the input.