Fault-tolerant control for full-state error constrained attitude tracking of uncertain spacecraft

Abstract

This paper explores the fault-tolerant control (FTC) problem for full-state error constrained attitude tracking of an uncertain spacecraft. The existing FTC solutions to this problem generally rely on an uniform strong controllability (USC) assumption that may not hold in the presence of multiplicative actuator faults. In this work, a sufficient condition for the USC assumption is presented to help evaluate the applicability of existing FTC solutions. Then, based on the unified error transformation method and symmetric barrier Lyapunov functions, a saturated adaptive robust FTC algorithm is proposed, which can eliminate the USC assumption without requiring the multiplicative actuator faults to be differentiable, while ensuring that (i) full-state error constraints are never violated; (ii) all closed-loop signals are bounded, despite the simultaneous presence of inertia uncertainties, disturbances, and actuator faults. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify our theoretical findings.