Preliminaries

Since the terminology used in the field of satellite attitude control and stability analysis of nonlinear systems is not unique and differs among authors, this chapter starts with a brief notations and expressions frequently used throughout the book. Following that, some mathematical lemmas and definitions are introduced to facilitate theoretical analysis in the rest of this book. The attitude control system of rigid or flexible satellite is then modeled. This chapter finishes with the testbeds used to verify the effectiveness of the subsequent modeling error compensation-based attitude control approaches.