Abstract
The attitude control has been recognized as one of the most important research topics for spacecraft. If the desired attitude trajectory cannot be tracked precisely, it may cause mission failures. In the real space mission environment, the unknown external perturbations, for example, atmospheric drag and solar radiation, should be taken into consideration. Such external perturbations could deviate the precision of the spacecraft orientation and thereby lead to a mission failure. Therefore, in this paper, a quaternion-based super-twisting sliding mode robust control law for the spacecraft attitude tracking is developed. The finite time stability based on the formulation of the linear matrix inequality (LMI) is also provided. To avoid losing the control degree of freedom due to the certain actuator fault, a redundant reaction wheels configuration is adopted. The actuators distribution associated force distribution matrix (FDM) is analyzed in detail. Finally, the reference tangent-normal-binormal (TNB) command generation strategy is implemented for simulating the scenario of the space mission. Finally, the simulation results reveal that the spacecraft can achieve the desired attitude trajectory tracking demands in the presence of the time-varying external disturbances.
Highlights
Sliding mode control (SMC) techniques have been a popular research topic of the control theory in recent years such as adaptive super-twisting SMC [1,2,3], fractional-order sliding mode control [4], finite time control [5], robust backstepping SMC [6,7,8], and model predictive SMC [9]. e superior robustness to the matched perturbations is one of the features of the SMC
The attitude dynamics based on the redundant reaction wheels configuration of the spacecraft is derived
The nonsquare force distribution matrix (FDM) is reformulated as a square, invertible matrix by means of solving a static
Summary
Sliding mode control (SMC) techniques have been a popular research topic of the control theory in recent years such as adaptive super-twisting SMC [1,2,3], fractional-order sliding mode control [4], finite time control [5], robust backstepping SMC [6,7,8], and model predictive SMC [9]. e superior robustness to the matched perturbations is one of the features of the SMC. Owing to the superior properties, the super-twisting algorithm has been applied in several studies, including quadrotor [25, 26], industrial emulator [27], and mobile wheeled inverted pendulum [28] E contributions of this paper are summarized as follows: (i) realizes the super-twisting sliding mode algorithm as a robust, continuous quaternion-based attitude controller for the attitude trajectory tracking demands of a spacecraft with the redundant reaction wheels; (ii) proposes a modified version of LMI which has higher degrees of freedom for finding the decision variables and it can satisfy the convergence performance by requirement; (iii) derives the analytic solution of the nonlinear reduced-order dynamics; and (iv) presents a reference TNB command generation strategy so that the feasibility of the controller can be verified
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