A Low-Complexity PD-Like Attitude Control for Spacecraft With Full-State Constraints

Abstract

The problem of attitude control for rigid spacecraft under the attitude and angular velocity constraints is investigated in this study. Particularly, a simple structure constrained proportional-derivative (PD)-like control is proposed which contains two portions. The first portion is a conventional PD control to provide convergence of the system states; whereas the second portion provides the desired performance specifications such as convergence rate, overshoot and steady-state bound for attitude and rotation velocity to improve the attitude pointing accuracy and pointing stability. The distinctive property of the suggested constrained control method is to ensure the desired performance in transient and steady-state phases for all the system states. It also possesses much simpler structure compared to the existing constrained control techniques since it is based on a new methodology. The simulation results conducted on a rigid spacecraft verify the efficiency of the proposed approach.

An Adaptive Control Methodology for Spacecraft Attitude Tracking Under Model and Environmental Uncertainties

“…Over the past few decades, the attitude tracking problem for rigid spacecraft has been the center of attention due to its broad applications to space missions such as Earth imaging, surveillance, spacecraft rendezvous and docking, on-orbit servicing, and space debris removal. However, it is still a challenging problem because the coupling between the attitude kinematics and dynamics is highly nonlinear and model and environmental uncertainties always exist [1]. To overcome these challenges, a large number of robust control methods have been explored, including proportional-integral-derivative control [2]- [4], backstepping control [5], [6], H  control [7], [8], and adaptive fuzzy control [9]- [11], to list a few.…”