Spacecraft anti-unwinding attitude tracking with guaranteed performance: A DREM-based adaptive control approach

This article proposes an indirect adaptive control scheme for spacecraft attitude tracking with guaranteed performance and unwinding avoidance. Performance funnels are imposed on a filtered tracking error to secure prescribed behavioral bounds for both attitude and angular velocity errors. Within this setting, if an adaptive controller is designed, the estimation-error-dependent perturbation term in the Lyapunov function derivative inevitably involves the unknown inertia matrix, which hinders the use of conventional direct adaptive control methods that typically rely on canceling the perturbation term. To address this issue, a parameter estimator is developed using the dynamic regressor extension and mixing (DREM) technique. Under a strictly weak assumption of interval excitation, the resulting estimation error dynamics can effectively dominate the perturbation term without depending on a fragile cancellation operation. By leveraging the DREM estimator and barrier functions, the designed adaptive controller achieves exponential attitude tracking with guaranteed performance bounds and unwinding avoidance. Finally, simulation and experimental results validate the efficacy of the proposed adaptive control approach.