Robust Vibration Control for Large-Scale Flexible Appendages of Spacecraft via Switching Distributed Model Predictive Control

This article investigates the issue of vibration control for the large-scale flexible appendage of spacecraft. A spatially interconnected system (SIS) model is introduced to decompose the high-dimensional appendage system, characterized by partial differential equations, into a series of physically interconnected subsystems, for computational tractability of online optimization. To describe the mode switching caused by temperature variations, a lower bounded Markov stochastic process is incorporated within the SIS model. Based on the improved SIS model, an efficient consensus distributed model prediction controller is developed, where a more lightweight communication graph is adopted to further improve online computation efficiency. Meanwhile, the concept of dissipativity is introduced into the design of model predictive control (MPC) cost function, effectively improving the robustness and reducing the conservatism. Illustrative simulations are conducted on a satellite with a large solar panel, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method.