Adaptive attitude control of liquid-filled spacecraft with flexible appendages

Abstract

In order to deal with the attitude control problem of liquid-filled spacecraft with flexible appendages, a study of adaptive control is conducted in this paper. The adaptive controller is designed to improve the performance of spacecraft implemented with both rigid and non-rigid inertial components. For such spacecraft, the sloshing of liquid and the vibration of flexible appendages will cause changes of the inertia matrix, which is composed of both rigid and only partially determined variable components. A new adaptive attitude controller is presented in this paper. The controller is shown to ensure almost global asymptotical stability of attitude tracking errors. The results of simulation demonstrate the applicability of such controller. The performance of controller is accurate enough, and the practical requirements are met.