Advanced Lyapunov Control of a Novel Laser Beam Tracking System

Abstract

Laser communication systems developed for mobile plat- forms, such as satellites, aircraft, and terrain vehicles, require fast wide-range beam-steering devices to establish and maintain a communication link. Conventionally, the low-bandwidth , high-steering-range part of the beam-positioning task is performed by gimbals that inherently constitutes the system bottleneck in terms of reliability, accuracy and dynamic per- formance. Omni-Wrist�, a novel robotic sensor mount capable of carrying a payload of 5 lb and providing a full 180-deg hemisphere of azimuth/ declination motion is known to be free of most of the deficiencies of gimbals.