Adaptive fault-tolerant control for attitude tracking of flexible spacecraft with limited data transmission

This article investigates the fault-tolerant control for attitude tracking problem of flexible spacecraft in the presence of actuator degradation, external disturbance, and signal quantization, where a logarithmic encoder-decoder scheme is employed for input quantization. A quantized adaptive terminal sliding mode control law is proposed to solve the attitude tracking problem. In this design, the quantizer parameters are injected to the controller gains to reject quantization errors, and the designed controller can compensate the effects of the unknown information, including actuator efficiency factors, external disturbance, and bounds of rigid-flexible coupled nonlinearity. It is shown that the attitude of the spacecraft can track the desired objective under the developed attitude controller. Finally, a simulation example is provided to verify the validness of the proposed attitude tracking control law.