This article presents a novel method for satellite attitude determination, using two electrostatically suspended gyroscopes (ESGs). In this method, two superconducting rings (like gimbals) rotated around each suspended spherical rotor, which causes a variable flux in the rings. A voltage will be induced in the rings according to Faraday’s law of induction. Satellite attitude is determined by integrating of the induced voltages and strap-down rate gyros using the extended Kalman filter. This gyroscope works precisely when the rotor is maintained at the center of the gyroscope cavity, between three pairs of the circular electrodes, and then a backstepping control algorithm is designed for this purpose. The performance of attitude determination using such sensor and designed control algorithm is evaluated by six-degree-of-freedom simulation of a satellite in the MATLAB software. The simulations show the proposed algorithm works in an excellent manner and has lower than a few hundred arc second errors. The accurately aligning of rotors in the known direction to space is essential and is another problem that we do not address here.

本文介绍了一种使用两个静电悬浮陀螺仪（ESG）进行卫星姿态确定的新颖方法。在这种方法中，两个超导环（如万向架）绕着每个悬挂的球形转子旋转，这导致了环中磁通量的变化。根据法拉第感应定律，环中将感应出电压。卫星姿态是通过使用扩展的卡尔曼滤波器对感应电压和捷联率陀螺仪进行积分来确定的。当转子保持在陀螺仪腔的中心，三对圆形电极之间时，该陀螺仪可以精确地工作，然后为此目的设计了一种反步控制算法。使用此类传感器和设计的控制算法确定姿态的性能是通过在MATLAB软件中对卫星进行六自由度仿真来评估的。仿真表明，所提出的算法工作良好，并且误差小于几百个弧秒。转子在已知方向上与空间的精确对齐至关重要，这是我们在此未解决的另一个问题。