Constrained adaptive fault-tolerant attitude tracking control of rigid spacecraft

A saturated fault-tolerant attitude tracking controller for disturbed rigid spacecraft is derived using nonlinear state feedback control method. The proposed controller achieves the constraints of control inputs by directly using the bounded function instead of the traditional saturation compensator technique, and the active tolerance to the partial loss of actuator effectiveness is also achieved by directly using the known bounds of the actuator faults in the controller. Specifically, compared with the traditional saturated control methods, a continuously bounded nonlinear function in the proposed controller is used to guarantee that the actuator outputs are smoothly bounded under the prescribed constraints. Based on some properties of the attitude tracking dynamics, the proposed controller can ensure the attitude tracking errors converge to small neighborhoods of zero via stability analysis in the Lyapunov framework. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the control scheme. (C) 2018 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.