Stabilisation of a Flexible Spacecraft Subject to External Disturbance and Uncertainties

Abstract

This paper addresses the problems of vibration reduction and attitude tracking for a flexible spacecraft subject to external disturbances and uncertainties. Based on Hamilton’s principle, flexible spacecraft is modelled by a coupled nonlinear partial differential equation with ordinary differential equations. Adaptive boundary control scheme is adopted to stabilize the vibration displacement of flexible appendage into a small neighbourhood of original position and simultaneously maintain attitude angle within the desired angle region. Two disturbance adaptive laws are constructed to attenuate the effect of unknown external disturbances. The well posedness of the controlled system is proven by using the semigroup theory. The proposed adaptive boundary control scheme can guarantee the uniform boundedness of the closed-loop system. Numerical simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.