Abstract
In this paper, robust control strategies are explored to solve the problem of rendezvous maneuver for rigid spacecraft exposed to the external disturbance, actuator faults and unknown inertial parameters. To pursue the control objective, two adaptive controllers are constructed via the sliding mode control (SMC) technology. Firstly, a basic control scheme is designed in the event of unknown inertial parameters and external disturbance, where the Minimum-learning-parameter (MLP) algorithm is adopted for approximating the unknown system dynamics. Though effective, the basic controller is not applicable in the actuator fault scenarios. Considering this drawback, adaptive laws are designed in the second controller to tackling the actuator faults. It is illustrated that the proposed controllers will endow tracking errors with asymptotic stability and strong robustness to actuator faults. Finally, the effectiveness of the control strategies is verified by numerical simulations.
Highlights
Spacecraft rendezvous technology has elicited widespread interest due to its distinctly important role in variety of space missions, such as Mars exploration, space object capturing, deep space exploration, etc
It is still a challenging work to construct such kind of controllers owing to the complexity of the external disturbance, unknown system dynamics and unexpected actuator faults
The inertial parameters may remain unknown to designers, which is mainly caused by the fuel consumptions and onboard payload variations
Summary
Spacecraft rendezvous technology has elicited widespread interest due to its distinctly important role in variety of space missions, such as Mars exploration, space object capturing, deep space exploration, etc. It is still a challenging work to construct such kind of controllers owing to the complexity of the external disturbance, unknown system dynamics and unexpected actuator faults. Despite of these difficulties, researchers have developed numerous strategies for spacecraft tracking control, including adaptive control [1]–[5], backstepping. Reviewing the existing results for spacecraft rendezvous, it can be found that the actuator failures, unknown inertia parameters and computational complexity are rarely treated simultaneously. The contribution of this paper can be summarized as follows: i) Compared with the existing literatures utilizing the neural networks [9]–[11], the MLP algorithm is adopted in the controller design process, which will reduce the computational complexity to some extent.
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