Studies On Design Technology And Autonomous Control Method Of Balloon-borne Gondola Platform

High altitude scientific balloon system is an important and organic part of spacescience and technology research activities. While the autonomous attitude controlsystem of a balloon-borne gondola platform which being the core and key of thisballoon system plays an active role in obtaining detailed and high quality research dataand promoting development of space science technology level and application level.With the development of space science and technology research activities, theballoon-borne gondola presents a series of new features: multi-task and multi-purposeplatform structure, high efficiency, low power consumption, long duration, highprecision control, high stability and high reliability. But its research work face withmany questions for its special working environment, complicated system structure, highperformance requirement and it being a relatively new field.In this paper, on the basis of a developed and successful gondola platform and itsautonomous attitude control system, the basic techniques to make the platform satisfiedwith the demand of multi-task and multi-purpose applications are introduced firstly.Secondly, the control methods to promote the control sysytem’s performance androbustness are described. The main contents and results are as follows:1) Analyzing the influence factors and realizing conditions of a successful highprecision autonomous attitude control system, and then give the system’scontrol scheme.2) Giving a complete design of this system. Hardware architecture, specificcomponents with their parameters, system integration, the allocation ofresources and the reliability design etc. are introduced in detail.3) Designing a ‘torque decoupler’ to make system controllable, which could rejectthe decoupling torque exist on the rope flexible structure. This torque decouplerhas higher safety factor and can work under the environment of ultra lowtemperature for unlimited time. It is the key link of realizing the high precisionand long duration attitude control system.4) Designing a comprehensive decoupler controller based on ‘torque decoupler’ toeliminate the decoupling torque, which also promote the system’s robustness toexternal disturbances. 5) Presenting a new multi-sliding mode control method to optimize the adaptivePID controller, reduce its complexity in case of multiple uncertainty parametersand enhance its robustness to nonlinearity, time-varying, vibration and outerdisturbance. The optimized adaptive PID controller also has a better controlaccuracy.