Prescribed performance adaptive attitude tracking control for flexible spacecraft with active vibration suppression

This paper investigates the high-performance attitude control and active vibration suppression problem for flexible spacecraft in the presence of external disturbances. The active vibration control usually depends on additional sensors and actuators, which will highly increase the difficulty of practical application. In order to reduce the implementation complexity, the piezoelectric sensors are not adopted, but instead a modal observer is introduced to estimate the modal information. Based on the observed modal information and the prescribed performance design process, an adaptive attitude controller is developed, which has the capabilities of rejecting disturbances as well as possessing predetermined transient and steady-state control performance. Similarly, an active controller is constructed to deal with the vibrations induced by attitude motions. It can be proved that by constraining the estimations of the modal variables, the actual modal coordinate will also be constrained with expected attenuation characteristics. The stability of the entire closed-loop system is analyzed by the Lyapunov theory. Simulation results in different cases show the effectiveness and performance of the proposed algorithms.