Disturbance observer based anti-disturbance fault tolerant control for flexible satellites

In the field of aerospace engineering, accurate control of a spacecraft's orientation is often very important to mission success. Therefore, attitude control is a technically plentiful and extensively studied subject in controls literature during recent decades. This investigation of spacecraft attitude control is assumed to address two important aspects of the problem solutions. One sliding mode anti-disturbance control for utilization of faulty actuator components and another one disturbance observer based control to improve the pointing accuracy in the absence of anti-vibration equipment for the elastic appendages like a solar panel. Simultaneous occurrence of vibration due to flexible appendages and reaction degradation due to failure in attitude actuators complicates this case. The advantage of this method is acquisition proper control by the combination of disturbance observer and sliding mode compensation that form a fault tolerant control for the concerned satellite attitude control system. Furthermore, the proposed composite method indicates that occurrence the failure in actuators and even elastic solar panel vibration effect may be handled directly without reconfiguring the control components or providing piezoelectric devices. It's noteworthy, attitude quaternion and angular velocity commands are robustly tracked via controllers to become inclined to zero.