Active vibration suppression in flexible spacecraft with optical measurement

With the development of the space station technology in China, the active vibration suppression of the lager flexible antennas and solar panels that mounted on the space station is demanded. The active vibration suppression is hard to achieve because these appendages are not allowed to mount actuators on it. Further, the practical goal is usually unachievable by the controller based on the unreliability or impracticality observed vibration parameters. In this paper, the active vibration suppression during the spacecraft attitude maneuver by the optical camera monitoring the dynamic behaviors of the flexible appendages is introduced under the restriction of the freedom of the actuators. The modal parameters of the flexible appendage used in the controller are obtained by the optical monitoring approach. A referenced angular velocity is set as the virtual input by the back-stepping control and Lyapunov method, and the control law is designed to track this virtual input. The constraint of the coefficient in the controller is investigated to guarantee the asymptotic convergence of the system considering angular velocity tracking error. The control manage coefficient is defined to describe the distribution coefficient of the vibration suppression in the design of control law. The relationship between the attitude maneuver accuracy and active vibration suppression is introduced. The appropriate control manage coefficient is obtained numerically. To guarantee the reliability or practicality of the designate flexible spacecraft control system, the optical measurements are used to measure the dynamic behaviors of the large flexible structures. The absence of displacement velocity sensors is compensated by the presence of appropriate dynamics in the controller. The results of simulation validate the feasibility of the proposed control strategy. (C) 2016 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.