Robust fault-tolerant control for flexible spacecraft against partial actuator failures

In this paper, we present a robust fault-tolerant control scheme to achieve attitude control of flexible spacecraft with disturbances and actuator failures. It is shown that the control algorithms are not only attenuate exogenous bounded disturbances with attenuation level, but also able to tolerate partial loss of actuator effectiveness. The proposed controller design is simple and can guarantee the faulty closed-loop system to be quadratically stable with a prescribed upper bound of the cost function. The design algorithms are obtained by combining free weighting matrices method with linear matrix inequality technique. The effectiveness of the proposed design method is demonstrated in a spacecraft attitude control system subject to loss of actuator effectiveness.