Ultimate state boundedness of underactuated spacecraft subject to an unmatched disturbance

Abstract

Ultimate state boundedness for underactuated spacecraft subject to large non-matched disturbances is attained. First, non-smooth time-invariant state feedback control laws that make the origin asymptotically stable are obtained. Then, the controller is extended to make the closed-loop system globally uniformly ultimately bounded under the following conditions: 1) the disturbances acting on the directly actuated states are known and 2) the disturbance acting on the unactuated state is bounded and its profile need not be known. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to verify the analytical results. A large step disturbance is considered, and it is shown that the proposed controller makes the closed-loop system globally uniformly ultimately bounded. The proposed method is rather general and can be extended to other systems.