Fault tolerant attitude control of under-actuated spacecraft: Theory and experiment

This paper investigates fault tolerant attitude control theory and experiment for under -actuated spacecraft with one reaction wheel completely broken and two others suffering actuator faults of partial loss of effectiveness or bias. A non-smooth robust adaptive fault tolerant control law is proposed under the zero-momentum and input saturation conditions. It shows that the avail-able reaction wheels need to produce sufficient control torque for the fault tolerance. Such a new control method is implemented in a semi-physical simulation system of an air-bearing platform. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in spacecraft practical engineer-ing.(c) 2023 Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).