Finite-time fault-tolerant attitude stabilization for spacecraft with actuator saturation

Abstract

This paper addresses the finite-time fault-tolerant attitude stabilization control problem for a rigid spacecraft in the presence of actuator faults or failures, external disturbances, and modeling uncertainties. First, a basic fault-tolerant controller is proposed to accommodate actuator faults or failures and guarantee local finite-time stability. When there is no a priori knowledge of actuator faults, disturbances, and inertia uncertainties, an online adaptive law is proposed to estimate the bounds of these uncertainties, and local finite-time convergence is achieved by an adaptive fault-tolerant controller. In addition, another adaptive fault-tolerant control scheme is derived that explicitly takes into account the actuator saturation. The proposed attitude controller provides fault-tolerant capability despite control input saturation and ensures that attitude and angular velocity converge to a neighborhood of the origin in finite time. Finally, simulation studies are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.