The ADCS-R3 is an integrated attitude control solution for 2-6 kg satellites. It includes four momentum wheels in tetrahedron configuration, three magnetorquer rods, gyro, accelerometer and ADCS computer in a very compact and rugged package. It is designed to operate with external attitude sensors connected via CAN bus such as sun sensors, star trackers and others.

The ACDS software running on the internal Cortex processor is based around an extended Kalman filter allowing a number sensors with varying performance to contribute to the attitude determination and control precision. The system  is capable of several different pointing modes such as nadir, sun tracking, ground spot tracking and inertial pointing.  In addition, the controller is able to track two prioritized targets simultaneously given that the primary target has at least one free axis. In this case, the free axis can be used to e.g. optimize the direction of solar panels towards the sun while pointing an antenna, camera or other payload towards a ground target.

Integral to the control system architecture is a built-in simulator which is capable of complete ADCS simulation with and without sensors and actuators in the loop. The simulator can run both on the ADCS hardware itself, but it can also be run on a linux-based PC at simulations speeds up to 10,000 times real-time. The simulator is extremely useful both to design ADCS objective but also to verify the integrated system integrity.

The ADCS-R3 uses four WHL-10 momentum wheels operating in momentum bias to provide very fine three-axis attitude control with a high degree of stability and long term durability. The wheels are placed in a tetrahedron configuration, which allows full control without ever reversing the spin direction of any wheel. In case of failure of one wheel, the three others can be reconfigured to maintain full control as the expense of slightly degraded performance. The system also includes three magnetorquer rods wound on ultra high permeability material resulting in a high efficiency.