Velocity-free fault-tolerant control allocation for flexible spacecraft with redundant thrusters

This paper proposes a novel velocity-free nonlinear proportional-integral (PI) control allocation scheme for fault-tolerant attitude control of flexible spacecraft under thruster redundancy. More specifically, the nonlinear PI controller for attitude stabilisation without using body angular velocity measurements is first designed as a virtual control of the control allocator to produce the three-axis moments, and can ultimately guarantee uniform boundedness of the closed-loop system in the presence of external disturbances and possible faults. The associated stability proof is constructive and accomplished by the development of passivity filter formulations together with the choice of a Lyapunov function containing mixed terms involving the various states. Then, a robust least-squares-based control allocation is employed to deal with the problem of distributing the three-axis moments over the available thrusters under redundancy, in which the focus of this control allocation is to find the optimal control vector of the actuator by minimising the worst-case residual, under the condition of thruster faults and control constraints like saturation. Simulation results using the orbiting flexible spacecraft model show good performance under external disturbances and even in different thruster fault scenarios, which validates the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed scheme.