Impulsive control for attitude stabilization in the presence of unknown bounded external disturbances

In this article, impulsive control is firstly considered for the quaternion-based attitude stabilization of a rigid spacecraft. Inspired by the robustness of sliding mode control, a new concept of impulsive-sliding mode is proposed to design robust impulsive controller for attitude stabilization. It illustrates that the designed impulsive controller possesses simple structure and robustness with respect to external disturbances. In order to achieve the relaxation of continuous measurement, we utilize periodic state measurement that is more economical and practical than the continuous one. Namely, we can achieve attitude stabilization and resource economization by adopting only discrete state measurement and discrete control input. More interestingly, our results can overcome the difficulty that the upper bound of disturbances is unknown, which is often required to design adaptive controller to handle in previous results. Moreover, we prove that the Zeno phenomenon can be excluded under the proposed periodic event-triggering strategy and the interevent time has a uniform lower bound. An illustrative example is presented to show the feasibility of our results.