An anti-disturbance PD control scheme for attitude control and stabilization of flexible spacecrafts

This paper studies the attitude control problem of spacecrafts with flexible appendages. It is well known that the unwanted vibration modes, model uncertainty and space environmental disturbances may cause degradation of the performance of attitude control systems for a flexible spacecraft. In this paper, the vibration from flexible appendages is modeled as a derivative-bounded disturbance to the attitude control system of the rigid hub. A disturbance-observer-based control (DOBC) is formulated for feedforward compensation of the elastic vibration. The model uncertainty and space environmental disturbances as well as other noises are merged into an “equivalent” disturbance. We design a composite controller with a hierarchical architecture by combining DOBC and PD control, where DOBC is used to reject the vibration effect from the flexible appendages. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate that by using the composite hierarchical control law, disturbances can be effectively attenuated and the robust dynamic performances be enhanced.