Quantitative Stability Attitude Tracking Control of Spacecraft With Arbitrary Disturbance Rejection

Abstract

Motivated by the fact that modern space missions impose increasingly stringent requirements on the robustness, response speed, and control precision of spacecraft attitude control systems, a continuous nonsingular attitude tracking controller with quantitative stability and arbitrary disturbance rejection performance is designed. A performance function with prescribed convergence time and precision is integrated with the adaptive method to achieve this control objective. The unit quaternion and the modified Rodrigues parameters (MRPs) are combined to exploit their respective advantages, achieving both global validity of attitude representation and nonsingularity of the controller. A variable transformation is incorporated with the MRPs, ensuring that the initial value of the attitude tracking error satisfies the constraint condition associated with the performance function. Lyapunov stability analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that the designed controller can drive the attitude tracking error to a prescribed vicinity of the origin in a prescribed time, and it is robust enough against arbitrary disturbance, such as unknown external disturbances, parameter uncertainties, and coupling effects between the large-scope spatial motion of the rigid hub and the vibration of flexible parts.