Development of MIL and PIL testbed for Student Microsatellite Attitude Control Subsystem

This paper presents design, analysis and performance verification test of student microsatellite Attitude Determination and Control Subsystem (ADCS) . ADCS design and implementation procedure contains several various steps. There are four main test levels during simulation called “Model-in-the-Loop”, “Software-in-the-Loop”, “Processor-in-the-Loop” and “Hardware-in-the-Loop”. This paper is a result of scientific and practical research during two years, on the student microsatellite, which is an eight-nation collaboration project among Asia-Pacific universities. In what follows, “Model-in-the-Loop” and “Processor-in-the-Loop” test and simulation will be discussed. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the result of these two tests and validate the ADCS design. In the end, it is demonstrated that designed control algorithms are precise enough to meet the student microsatellite ADCS requirements and they can be used in the next level of microsatellite development.