A comparison between HMLP and HRBF for attitude control

In this paper the problem of controlling the attitude of a rigid body, such as a spacecraft, in three-dimensional space is approached by introducing two new control strategies developed in hypercomplex algebra. The proposed approaches are based on two parallel controllers, both derived in quaternion algebra. The first is a feedback controller of the proporitonal derivative (PD) type, while the second is a feeforward controller, which is implemented either by means of a hypercomplex multilayer perceptron (HMLP) neural network or by means of a hypercomplex radial basis function (HRBF) neural network. Several simulations show the performance of the two approaches. The results are also compared with a classical PD controller and with an adaptive controller, showing the improvements obtained by using neural networks, especially when an external disturbance acts on the rigid body. In particular the HMLP network gave better results when considering trajectories not presented during the learning phase.