Design of Attitude Controller Without Angular Velocity Measurement of Flexible Spacecraft

In this paper, the design of attitude controller is investigated for a class of flexible spacecraft. Two attitude controllers are proposed for flexible spacecraft to guarantee the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop systems without using angular velocity measurement. First, a partial state feedback controller is established when the flexible modal variables are measurable and angular velocity is not available. Second, an observer based feedback controller is developed when both the modal variables and angular velocity are not available. Finally, two numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of two given controllers.