Attitude control of a rigid spacecraft

Abstract

Attitude control of spacecraft systems has been a benchmark control problem and has been extensively studied under various assumptions and scenarios. When a spacecraft system is subject to external disturbances, the attitude control problem poses some specific challenges. In this chapter, we consider the attitude control problem for a spacecraft subject to a class of external disturbances which is a multi-tone sinusoidal function. The techniques introduced in the previous chapters are integrated to solve this problem. This chapter is organized as follows. In Sects. 10.1 and 10.2, we present the model of a rigid spacecraft, and formulate the attitude tracking and disturbance rejection problem, respectively. Then a special case where the model of the spacecraft is known exactly is handled in Sect. 10.3 using the internal model approach studied in Chap. 7. In Sects. 10.4 and 10.5, taking into account the model uncertainty, we detail the approach to dealing with the attitude control and disturbance rejection problem for the case where the frequencies of the disturbance are known and the case where the frequencies of the disturbance are unknown, respectively. The notes and references are given in Sect. 10.6.