Finite-time attitude maneuvering and vibration suppression of flexible spacecraft

The finite-time attitude maneuvering control and vibration suppression for the flexible spacecraft with external disturbances, inertia uncertainties and input saturation are investigated in this paper. Firstly, the input shaping technique is applied to suppress most of the vibration caused by flexible appendages. Then, for the nominal attitude control system, a multivariable continuous sliding mode controller is applied to guarantee the finite-time convergence. Next, unlike the conventional discontinuous design of integral sliding mode, a continuous compensated controller with modified multivariable adaptive twisting algorithm is proposed to reject the lumped uncertainty, including disturbances, uncertainties, saturation and residual vibration. The controller can realize finite time convergence and the chattering suppression, while there's no need for the priori knowledge of the lumped uncertainty. A rigorous proof of the finite time stability of the closed-loop system is derived by the Lyapunov method. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed method is illustrated by numerical simulations. (C) 2019 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.