Data-driven solutions to spacecraft relative attitude-position fault-tolerant control

Abstract

In this paper, the previous work of the authors on Subspace Predictive Control (SPC) in the context of spacecraft roto-translational relative motion is pursued, and the introduced novel SPC-based approach to fault-tolerant control (FTC) of nonlinear time-variant systems is further investigated. Firstly, the effectiveness of the proposed SPC-based framework for adaptive control allocation is exploited. Subsequently, separating nonlinear control and control allocation blocks yields a new layered SPC-based control scheme. Furthermore, designating a dedicated controller for each of the coupled motions leads to a novel distributed SPC-based architecture. Accordingly, three complete model-free fault-tolerant controllers for coupled nonlinear time-variant plants are developed, which solely need the knowledge of the occurrence time of faults as prerequisite. An internal fault diagnosis capability is also introduced, which makes the framework completely self-sufficient. Finally, the proposed framework is verified by challenging simulated scenarios.