Adaptive Sliding Mode Attitude Tracking Control for Flexible Spacecraft

Abstract

In this paper an adaptive sliding mode controller is proposed for attitude tracking of flexible spacecraft, in which adaptive mechanism is adopted to estimate disturbances with unknown upper bounds and inertia parameters. A nonlinear observer is designed to estimate vibration modes of flexible appendages so that the vibration can be actively suppressed. The stability of the closed-loop system is proved by Lyapunov technique. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can achieve attitude tracking control and effectively suppress induced vibrations of flexible appendages.