The high-precision speed control of gimbal servo systems is the key to generating high-precision torque for control moment gyroscopes (CMGs) in spacecrafts. However, the control performance of gimbal servo systems may be degraded significantly by disturbances, especially a dynamic imbalance disturbance with the same frequency as the high-speed rotor. For assembled CMGs, it is very difficult to measure the rotor imbalance directly by using a dynamic balancing machine. In this paper, a gimbal disturbance observer is proposed to estimate the dynamic imbalance of the rotor assembled in the CMG. First, a third-order dynamical system is established to describe the disturbance dynamics of the gimbal servo system, in which the rotor dynamic imbalance torque along the gimbal axis and the other disturbances are modeled to be periodic and bounded, respectively. Then, the gimbal disturbance observer is designed for the third-order dynamical system by using the total disturbance as a virtual measurement. Since the virtual measurement is derived from the inverse dynamics of the gimbal servo system, the information of the rotor dynamic imbalance can be obtained indirectly only using the measurements of gimbal speed and three-phase currents. Semi-physical experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the observer by using a CMG simulator.
Keywords: control moment gyros; disturbance observer; gimbal servo system; rotor imbalance.