Reaction wheel fault tolerant control for spacecraft attitude stabilization with finite‐time convergence

Abstract

The problem of fault tolerant attitude stabilization with finite-time convergence is investigated for spacecraft with redundant actuators. On the basis of the sliding mode control technique, a robust controller is derived with uncertain inertia parameters, actuator faults, and external disturbances explicitly addressed. It is shown that finite-time reachability into the small neighborhood of sliding surface, and faster time convergence of attitude orientation are achieved. To address actuator input constraints, an adaptive fault tolerant controller is further proposed. One feature of the proposed strategy is that the design of the fault tolerant control does not require any fault detection and isolation mechanism to detect, separate, and identify actuator faults. The attitude stabilization performance using the controller is evaluated through a numerical example. Copyright a number of researchers have resorted to fault tolerant control (FTC) [8][9][10]. A wide class of FTC controllers have been developed by using absolute stability theory framework [11], control allocation [12], and adaptive control [13]. As for the application of FTC to spacecraft attitude control, to the best knowledge of the authors, there exist minor investigations. In [14], the problem of automated attitude recovery for rigid and flexible spacecraft application was discussed. Another fault tolerant attitude control design was reported in [15] to compensate for effectiveness loss of reaction wheels. The controller was developed in the absence of external disturbances and uncertain inertia parameters. In [16], passive and active sliding mode control laws were developed to solve the attitude stabilization problem with actuator outage fault accommodated. In the work in [17], thruster failures were accommodated by proposing a reliable control scheme. In a more recent work [18], the authors derived a fault tolerant control strategy to follow the desired attitude for flexible spacecraft represented by quaternion. Among various schemes of FTC design, the insensitivity and robustness properties of sliding mode control make it attractive for fault tolerant control. The adaptive sliding mode control design technique was thoroughly examined in [19] to perform attitude tracking maneuver for flexible spacecraft. In [20], the problem of sensor fault estimation and compensation for microsatellite was investigated by using a descriptor system approach. In [21], the authors focused on the problem of rapid reorienting of a rigid spacecraft with no control available on either roll or yaw axis.Sliding mode control has several advantages such as rapid response, insensitive to parameter variations, and low computational costs. However, it usually requires large control power for its use of large bounds on the uncertainties/disturbances. In practical aerospace engineering, because of physical limitations, the outputs of momentum exchange devices and/or thrusters are constrained. A common example of such a constraint is actuator saturation. If an unknown fault occur...

Finite‐time attitude control for rigid spacecraft‐based on adaptive super‐twisting algorithm

“…By those conditions, we select the gains as (20) to achieve thatQ(t) is positive definite for every value of (t, S). It follows from above analysis and inequality (32) thaṫ…”

“…Comparison results between the proposed SMC laws (7) and (43) and existing controllers: Numerical data was taken from [43,44], where the nominal inertia matrix is set as J 0 = diag [10,15,20] [43,44]. The parameters of AFTSMCL (7) are chosen as k 1 = 0.26, Table 2.…”

Robust attitude maneuver control of spacecraft with reaction wheel low-speed friction compensation

“…As can be seen, the wheel speed crossed zero at 2100 s and 5200 s as well. The friction observer (7) can effectively estimate the wheel speed and friction torque, which can then be used to design the attitude controller. The pitch angle and the y-axis angular velocity which converge to ±9 × 10 −5 rad (±0.005 • ) and ±4 × 10 −6 rad/s (±2.3 × 10 −4• /s) respectively are given in Figs.…”

“…Due to their small weight, high reliability and agility, reaction wheels are commonly used actuators that store and exchange angular momentum to generate the necessary torques to perform attitude maneuvers. This is particularly true for some small spacecraft platforms, which require high precision pointing, accurate stabilization and rapid maneuver [7][8][9][10]. Periodic disturbances and perturbations could however lead to speed reversals, also known as zero-crossings, which may cause an abrupt increase in the spacecraft attitude maneuver errors.…”

Adaptive actuator failure compensation for multivariable feedback linearizable systems

“…Based on the fuzzy adaptive control technique, the fault‐tolerant tracking control problem for near‐space vehicle (NSV) attitude dynamics via Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy models is investigated in . Adaptive sliding mode‐based FTC schemes are developed for a civil aircraft and spacecraft attitude control system . The fault detection and diagnosis approach has also been used for control of systems with component failures .…”