A dual-stage control system design method is presented for the three-axis-rotational maneuver and vibration stabilization of a spacecraft with flexible appendages embedded with piezoceramics as sensor and actuator. In this design approach, the attitude control and the vibration suppression sub-systems are designed separately using the lower order model. The design of attitude controller is based on the variable structure control (VSC) theory leading to a discontinuous control law. This controller accomplishes asymptotic attitude maneuvering in the closed-loop system and is insensitive to the interaction of elastic modes and uncertainty in the system. To actively suppress the flexible vibrations, the modal velocity feedback control method is presented by using piezoelectric materials as additional sensor and actuator bonded on the surface of the flexible appendages. In addition, a special configuration of actuators for three-axis attitude control is also investigated: the pitch attitude controlled by a momentum wheel, and the roll/yaw control achieved by on-off thrusters, which is modulated by pulse width pulse frequency modulation technique to construct the proper control torque history. Numerical simulations performed show that the rotational maneuver and vibration suppression are accomplished in spite of the presence of disturbance torque and parameter uncertainty.
A fault tolerant control （FTC） design technique against actuator stuck faults is investigated using integral-type sliding mode control （ISMC） with application to spacecraft attitude maneuvering control system. The principle of the proposed FTC scheme is to design an integral-type sliding mode attitude controller using on-line parameter adaptive updating law to compensate for the effects of stuck actuators. This adaptive law also provides both the estimates of the system parameters and external disturbances such that a prior knowledge of the spacecraft inertia or boundedness of disturbances is not required. Moreover, by including the integral feedback term, the designed controller can not only tolerate actuator stuck faults, but also compensate the disturbances with constant components. For the synthesis of controller, the fault time, patterns and values are unknown in advance, as motivated from a practical spacecraft control application. Complete stability and performance analysis are presented and illustrative simulation results of application to a spacecraft show that high precise attitude control with zero steady-error is successfully achieved using various scenarios of stuck failures in actuators.
