Attitude control and sloshing suppression for liquid-filled spacecraft in the presence of sinusoidal disturbance

The attitude regulation for a liquid-filled spacecraft in the presence of low frequency sinusoidal disturbance is considered in this paper. The liquid-filled spacecraft is modelled as a rigid body attached with a simple pendulum. A novel control scheme is proposed, which is composed of Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC), Positive Position Feedback (PPF), Extended State Observer (ESO) and Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA). The unknown sloshing mode could be estimated from the combined ESO and SSA, and accordingly ADRC and PPF controller is designed for the stabilization of the spacecraft. Particularly, the parameters of the disturbance are not required as long as its frequency is lower than the sloshing one. The proposed approach could provide stabilization for the spacecraft, rejection for the disturbance,and active damping for the sloshing. Its effectiveness is validated by numerical simulations. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.