Inertially stabilized pointing control system

A pointing control system, combining passive inertial stabilization with active control, is presented. Such systems can direct an apparatus towards a fixed or slow moving target from a moving vehicle whose motion is almost rectilinear. The system was initially conceived to study the total solar eclipse in August 1999 in Romania. The passive inertial stabilization method consists of suspending a large mass by means of very low friction bearings. Consequently, a good static and dynamic equilibration is required. If the position information used by the control system is obtained by processing the image of the target, the large time delay involved makes the control synthesis rather difficult. In this paper, two control synthesis approaches, both providing the required tracking precision, and a comparison between the two corresponding control algorithms are presented.