State Feedback Tracking of a Nonholonomic Control Moment Gyroscope

This paper describes how to use a cascaded back-stepping approach to develop state feedback control laws for the tracking of a restricted control moment gyroscope (CMG), which constitutes a remarkable example of a nonholonomic system that arises as a consequence of its symmetry properties. A nonholonomic control system formulation is first introduced for the restricted CMG dynamics. The backstepping technique is then used to design a state feedback control law for the tracking of the CMG system. The paper provides detailed derivations along with numerical simulations and experimental results to illustrate the effectiveness of the tracking controller.