Anti‐unwinding adaptive spacecraft attitude tracking control based on similar skew‐symmetric structures

Abstract

This article addresses the adaptive attitude tracking control based on similar skew-symmetric structure. Based on the structure, a novel adaptive backstepping scheme is proposed to design the attitude controller. To avoid unwinding, a rotation matrix rather than a quaternion is used to describe the attitude. Correspondingly, the application of similar skew-symmetric structure is extended from euclidean space to noneuclidean space, for which the stability is proved by combining the Lyapunov function and the Morse-Lyapunov function. In addition, the smooth projection function is adopted to design the adaptive law for the unknown parameters. And the input-to-state stable property of the closed-loop system is proved when considering the unmodeled disturbance. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.