Robust fault-tolerant attitude control for satellite with multiple uncertainties and actuator faults

In this paper, the satellite attitude control system subject to parametric perturbations, external disturbances, time-varying input delays, actuator faults and saturation is studied. In order to make the controller architecture simple and practical, the closed-loop system is transformed into a disturbance-free nominal system and an equivalent disturbance firstly. The equivalent disturbance represents all above uncertainties and actuator failures of the original system. Then a robust controller is proposed in a simple composition consisting of a nominal controller and a robust compensator. The nominal controller is designed for the transformed nominal system. The robust compensator is developed from a second-order filter to restrict the influence of the equivalent disturbance. Stability analysis indicates that both attitude tracking errors and compensator states can converge into the given neighborhood of the origin in finite time. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed control law, numerical simulations are carried out in different cases. Presented results demonstrate that the high-precision attitude tracking control can be achieved by the proposed fault-tolerant control law. Furthermore, multiple system performances including the control accuracy and energy consumption index are fully discussed under a series of compensator parameters.