Constrained Nonsingular Terminal Sliding Mode Attitude Control for Spacecraft: A Funnel Control Approach

Abstract

This paper presents an adaptive constrained attitude control for uncertain spacecraft. Inspired by the concept of nonsingular terminal sliding mode control and funnel control for nonlinear systems, a novel adaptive attitude control is introduced which contains a time-varying gain to handle the constraints imposed on the spacecraft attitude. Indeed, when the attitude trajectory approaches the boundary of the constraint set, the control effort as well as the time-varying gain will increase in order to preclude the trajectory from intersecting the boundary. Then, it is analytically proved that the system trajectories converge to an arbitrary small region around the origin within a fixed time where the smallest upper bound of the convergence time is determined as an independent parameter in the controller. Further, the proposed control scheme is nonsingular without having to use any piecewise continuous function which simplifies stability analysis. These properties distinguish the proposed control scheme from the existing finite/fixed-time attitude controls. Finally, several simulation results confirm the robustness and performance of the proposed control framework.