Attitude stabilization of flexible spacecrafts via extended disturbance observer based controller

To achieve the high-precision attitude stabilization for the flexible spacecraft in the presence of space environmental disturbances, unmodeled dynamics, and the disturbances caused by the elastic vibration of flexible appendages, an extended disturbance observer (EDO) based controller is proposed. The proposed controller is formulated by combining EDO and a backstepping feedback controller. EDO is used to estimate the disturbance, which is modeled as an unknown high-order differentiable equation and the rth-order derivative of the disturbance is assumed to be bounded. Compared to the conventional first-order disturbance observer, the higher order EDO offers improvement in estimate accuracy, if the absolute values of poles for EDO transfer function are chosen larger than the frequency content of the disturbance. Then, the output of EDO plus the backstepping feedback controller are applied to stabilize the attitude with high precision by rejecting disturbances for the flexible spacecraft. Finally, numerical simulations have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller.