Velocity-free attitude tracking for rigid spacecraft via bounded control

This article investigates the attitude tracking control problem for a rigid spacecraft without angular velocity feedback, in which external disturbances, parametric uncertainties, and input saturation are considered. Initially, an angular velocity observer is developed incorporated with adaptive technique, which could tackle the unmeasurable angular velocity and system uncertainties simultaneously. By introducing adaptive updating law into the proposed observer, the synchronized uncertainties are handled such that robustness of the observer is enhanced, even in the presence of external disturbances. Further, for solving the input constraints problem, command filter and backstepping method are utilized; thus, a bounded attitude tracking control law is derived. Finally, the attitude tracking performance is evaluated by numerical examples.