Flexible spacecraft attitude stabilisation using optimised mixed proportional-derivative control technique

This paper investigates the issue of attitude control for a flexible spacecraft subject to the vibrational effects of its flexible appendages. To handle this challenge, an efficient control technique is proposed based on an optimised mixed proportional-derivative (OMPD) controller. The proposed control design can be expressed as the combination of conventional proportional-derivative (PD) control law and auxiliary control terms (ACT) to mitigate the influence of the flexible appendages and ensure the overall stability of the spacecraft attitude. The stability of the closed loop system is proven theoretically via Lyapunov method. In addition, the controller parameters are fine-tuned using particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm. Finally, numerical results are presented to show the performance of the developed controller.