Adaptive Sliding Mode Attitude and Vibration Control of Flexible Spacecraft under Unknown Disturbance and Uncertainty

This paper is concerned with the development of a control system for rotational maneuver and vibration suppression of a flexible spacecraft. It is assumed that the system parameters are unknown. The design approach presented here treats the problem of spacecraft attitude control separately from the elastic vibration suppression problem. As a stepping stone, a state feedback sliding mode control command is designed for the reaction wheel to achieve the reference trajectory tracking control of attitude angle. This is followed by the design of an adaptive sliding mode control (ASMC) law using only the output for robust stabilization of spacecraft in the presence of parametric uncertainty and external disturbances. Although this controller has the ability to reject the disturbance, deal with uncertainty and to ensure that the system output errors asymptotically converge to the sliding mode during the commanded motion, it excites the elastic modes of flexible appendages. The undesirable vibration is actively suppressed by applying feedback control voltages to the piezoceramic actuators, in which the control voltages are determined using the modal velocity feedback control method. Both analytical and numerical results are presented to show the theoretical and practical merits of this hybrid approach