Decentralized active sensor fault tolerance in attitude control of satellite formation flying

Abstract

SummaryThis article presents a decentralized framework of active fault tolerant control for attitude synchronization in satellite formation flying. By employing a nonlinear observer and a static approximator, the fault in both the angular velocity and orientation sensors can be diagnosed whether the sensor belongs to the satellite or its neighbors. The convergence of the observer is guaranteed by utilizing Lyapunov's direct method and Barbalat's lemma. The proposed approach is based on unknown input and requires only the angular velocity and orientation of the states in a decentralized architecture. Moreover, by designing a sensor fault tolerant controller, the tracking synchronization among the satellites' attitudes with individual set‐points is guaranteed and the uniformly ultimate boundedness of the synchronization/tracking errors is provided. The simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of the developed algorithm.