John Olafson Jasmine Johnson Sean Miller Bryce Henson Michael Murphy
Attitude Determination and Control Systems (ADCS) are used to detect and alter the orientation of spacecraft in orbit. Most spacecraft contain ADCS, but they are especially important for satellites wh..
Attitude Determination and Control Systems (ADCS) are used to detect and alter the orientation of spacecraft in orbit. Most spacecraft contain ADCS, but they are especially important for satellites whose onboard instruments require a high degree of directional precision. In satellites, reaction wheels are commonly used as the actuators of the control system. The goal of our capstone project is to apply the same technology to a ground-based system. The Balancing Reactive Inertia Cube (BRIC) is a self-contained cube that uses reaction wheels to balance on a corner. This project is inspired by the Cubli created by the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich. Our project mostly focuses on a prototype that limits the system to a single dimension. The system can be dynamically modeled as an inverted pendulum and using a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) control model we can efficiently achieve inverted balance using an 8-bit microcontroller.