Adaptive fault-tolerant attitude tracking control for spacecraft with time-varying inertia uncertainties

This paper is devoted to adaptive attitude tracking control for rigid spacecraft in the presence of parametric uncertainties, actuator faults and external disturbance. Specifically, a dynamic model is established based on one-tank spacecraft, which explicitly takes into account changing Center of Mass (CM). Then, a control scheme is proposed to achieve attitude tracking. Benefiting from explicitly considering the changing CM during the controller design process, the proposed scheme possesses good robustness to parametric uncertainties with less fuel consumption. Moreover, a fault-tolerant control algorithm is proposed to accommodate actuator faults with no need of knowing the actuators’ fault information. Lyapunov-based analysis is provided and the closed-loop system stability is rigorously proved. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.