Attitude Maneuver of Spacecraft with Angular Velocity Constraint

This paper is concerned with a rest-to-rest attitude maneuver of spacecraft subject to angular velocity constraint and external disturbances. An auxiliary sliding vector is first introduced and its state trajectory is restrained a priori by relative prescribed performance functions. Then, an adaptive controller incorporating error transformed technique is proposed, which enables the spacecraft to orientate any specified trajectory with high precision. It is shown that the developed control scheme is not only robust against unexpected environmental disturbances, but also able to ensure the constraint on angular velocity is perfectly fulfilled. Based on the standard Lyapunov theory, all signals in the closed-loop system are proved to be uniformly ultimately bounded. Finally, numerical simulations performed on a microsatellite are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.