Modal parameter identification of flexible spacecraft using the covariance-driven stochastic subspace identification (SSI-COV) method

In this paper, the on-orbit identification of modal parameters for a spacecraft is investigated. Firstly, the cou-pled dynamic equation of the system is established with the Lagrange method and the stochastic state-space model of the system is obtained. Then, the covariance-driven stochas-tic subspace identification (SSI-COV) algorithm is adopted to identify the modal parameters of the system. In this algo-rithm, it just needs the covariance of output data of the system under ambient excitation to construct a Toeplitz matrix, thus the system matrices are obtained by the singular value decom-position on the Toeplitz matrix and the modal parameters of the system can be found from the system matrices. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the validity of the SSI-COV algorithm. Simulation results indi-cate that the SSI-COV algorithm is effective in identifying the modal parameters of the spacecraft only using the output data of the system under ambient excitation.