Attitude tracking of rigid bodies on the special orthogonal group with bounded partial state feedback

A solution to the attitude tracking problem of rigid bodies with kinematic representation directly on the special orthogonal group SO(3) of rotation matrices is proposed. A dynamic partial state feedback controller is designed to address the case where no angular velocity measurements are available. In addition, the gains in the control design can be tuned in advance to ensure that the torque inputs satisfy arbitrary saturation bounds. Stability conditions are provided based on Lyapunov function analysis and Barbalat's lemma. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed control scheme.