Adaptive Spacecraft Control: Stability, Performance, and Robustness

This paper designs a low-frequency learning adaptive control architecture for a flexible spacecraft. The proposed architecture involves a new and novel controller structure involving a modification term in the update law. In particular, this modification term filters out the high-frequency content contained in the update law while preserving stability of the system error dynamics. This key feature of our design allows for robust, fast adaptation in the face of high-gain learning rates. A numerical illustrative study is provided for a flexible spacecraft to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed design.